HTML Encoded Captchas

rangeva writes to tell us about a twist he has developed on the common Captcha technique to discourage spam bots: HECs encode the Captcha image into HTML, thus presenting an unsolved challenge to the bots' programmers. From the writeup: "The Captcha is no longer an image and therefore not a resource they can download and process. The owner of the site can change the properties of the Captcha's HTML, making it unique,... add[ing] another layer of complication for the bot to crack." HECs are not exactly lightweight — the one on the linked page weighs in at 218K — but this GPL'd project seems like a nice advance on the state of the art.

Comments

Re:workaround...

[Phillup]

When it comes to porn, I'm no slouch and I can count the number of times I've seen sites that give you free access after entering a captcha on one hand.

One hand eh?

Guess we don't really need to ask how you know this...