[Mimedefang] Image validator/OCR SA plugin

[Philip Prindeville]

Dave Williss wrote:

>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Gary Funck" <gary at intrepid.com>
>To: <mimedefang at lists.roaringpenguin.com>
>Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 6:34 PM
>Subject: RE: [Mimedefang] Image validator/OCR SA plugin
>
>
>  
>
>>Martin wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>But problably the spammers
>>>will soon change their tricks to different images which are more
>>>difficult to read :-(
>>>
>>>http://antispam.imp.ch/patches/patch-ocrtext
>>>      
>>>
>>On this topic, Nick FitzGerald mentioned this article,
>>http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/01/do-spammers-fear-ocr.html
>>
>>Sunday, January 15, 2006
>>Do spammers fear OCR?
>>Nick FitzGerald recently sent me two sample spams that seem to indicate 
>>that
>>some spammers fear that using images in place of words isn't enough. 
>>They've
>>started to obscure their messages to prevent optical character 
>>recognition.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm afraid they'll start using OCR themselves.  One common trick to allow a 
>web
>site to have an email address humanly readable but not harvestable is to put 
>it
>in an image.  That may not be so safe any more :-(  Of course, they'd have 
>to
>scan an awful lot of images in the hopes of finding an email address in any
>of them, so they may not find it worth the effort.
>  
>

Good!

That's all I can say.

Fine!

Putting stuff into bitmaps is a travesty, and makes websites (a) harder
to search on
automatically, but much more egregious is that (b) it limits their
accessibility to people
with vision impairment using text-to-speech browsers.

A lot of web pages also don't seem to take into account .21 or .19 pitch
LCD monitors
(like the 2560x1600 monitor I'm staring at).  Do you know how small a
7x9 font looks
like on that monitor?  It looks like lint.  Putting images or explicit
font sizes (like "use a
9 pixel high font here" instead of saying "use a 8 point font here [and
let the browser
scale it appropriately]" is idiotic).

I'm glad SOME good has finally come of the travail of spammers (though I
never thought
I'd live to hear myself say it).

Ok.  End of rant.

-Philip