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GoDaddy.com launches RecallVeriSign.com Web site
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See CAPTCHA.net [captcha.net] or search Google for CAPTCHA for info on those kinds of image tests, designed to be too hard a problem for computer science to currently solve, but easy enough for a child to pass.
The same kinds of techniques are used all over the place, from creating a new Yahoo account, to passing a "white-list" anti-spam filter, to doing a WHOIS at NSI, GoDaddy, OpenSRS or other big registrars who don't want their WHOIS database harvested by robots.
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GoDaddy was already using randomly generated password images for their web WHOIS access to stop data-mining, so this is nothing new. Many other registrars now do the same thing, although GoDaddy was the first registrar I know of to do so. Not that GoDaddy invented it or anything, the same technique has been in use for a few years with some search engines who were getting hit with automated mass site submissions (called spamdexing). You'll note that the images are obscured in some fashion so as to fool automated optical character recognition. When the search engines first started using image text it wasn't obscured and it wasn't long before those who don't play nice got around that. I'm not convinced that many of the current image schemes couldn't be similarily bypassed. Most sites make use of alphanumeric characters that are at least similar to each other and OCR software can be taught to recognize a given font. I have also seen sites where a given image has a unique name (eg. the letter 'a' is called 123.gif, 'b' is 124.gif) so a request for an image could also be parsed and responses automated. -g
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