Quote: roscoff @ February 6 2009, 12:17 AM GMTBeware the Scots. Murrayfield is a graveyard for Grand Slam hopefuls. Just ask the English.
Fair enough. But as long as we can beat England and France I'll be happy. Oh and Ireland.
I crave your indulgence Page 5
Quote: Aaron @ February 5 2009, 11:24 PM GMTI'm not sure where to even start answering this. It's a reasonably well known, reputable system. If you think your site is that important and that upsing someone else's system is too dangerous, then that's a judgement for you. The front page says it's copyright Carnegie Mellon, and just a couple of clicks will confirm that for you on CM's own site.
In any case, how would any other users know that YOUR site isn't run by these pesky 'Internet crooks'? To be totally blunt, it doesn't exactly look professional.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Don't make your users think. If someone's coming to your site for help, chances are they're exasperated and tired already - hardly in the mood for all these brain teasers. It's like you're actively trying to stop anyone from signing up. I wouldn't expect that kind of thing unless I was actively looking for a site with mental quizzes and challenges, and I cannot think of anyone who would sit through it rather than head back to Google and find somewhere else.
And that's not even with my HCI hat on.
Had someone not been prepared to try something new then Captcha would not exist.
The objective is to verify that an enquirer is human by using human facilities.
some computers use fingerprint, Captcha tests for Optical Character Recognition, this new system of mine tests for associative memory.
Quite frankly, I don't really want any IT questions from people not prepared to think, because it would be too d***n hard to get through to them to fix their problem anyway. The can go watch "The It Crowd" instead. 
In practice almost anyone who would post questions are prior customers & the whole thing would work just as well if the [resister] page had no hyperlin, just a verbal one from me. This is just an excercise, exploring it on my website for techniques that I might use on other's sites later.
My front web page hasn't been altered significantly for 15 years and looks it I can't be bothered much with that part). The portion of the site in question is http://www.datahighways.net/support/
My point about the ownership of reCaptcha is irrelevant to the ownership of my ste. The point is that you have to be extra extra careful when you make use of a service which provides a security service.
Quote: zooo @ February 5 2009, 7:19 PM GMTYeah, they can be reeeeally annoying!
>Yeah, they [Captchas] can be reeeeally annoying!
The annoy the heck out of me which is why I didn't want to use one in this case.
Was that Swahili? He's talking Swahili right?
Bill can't you do it in flash so it's quick and easy for people to click the options but a robot wouldn't be able to access the flash file?
Quote: Gavin @ February 6 2009, 12:35 AM GMTBill can't you do it in flash so it's quick and easy for people to click the options but a robot wouldn't be able to access the flash file?
Oh there's a million ways to do the actual selection. Clicking the right answers in sequence is probably the simplest. I haven't really decided on the actual mechanism. I was only trying out question situations here.
The make up a password approach that I based this topic on has the advantage that nowhere in the HTML is the link to the page it goes to so a spammer or robot cannot find the link by reading the HTML source of the gateway page. Nor can it be reconstructed from the well known methods of obscuring hyperlinks.
I use that make a password technique on this page:
http://www.datahighways.co.uk/subaqua/
the gateway relies on information that the valid users know but non valid users are unlikely to know. It's not a high security site, the gateway is just a tool to keep out oiks & spammers. Should it ever be breached and the password broadcast to spammers, a fairly quick change of question and password can be implemented.
YOU could probably get through that gateway with a little research.
Quote: zooo @ February 5 2009, 11:47 PM GMTNo, Gav fancies Ruby too.
Ha!
Quote: RubyMae - Glamourous Snowdrop at Large @ February 5 2009, 11:49 PM GMTThey only want my boobies.
knees*
Y'all know the joke about knowing which is which of the stalagmites and stalagtites in a cave..
Stalag MITES grow up and stalag TIGHTS come down.
Well Columns go up & down and Rows go across! Think stone columns on a building and oars on a rowing boat.
====================
To wrap it up, the answer to the original message is as follows
1 Azure
2 snowdrop
3 the number in the 4th column is 43
and the number in row 3 happens to be the same cell in the table where col 4 and row3 cross, so it is also 43. Product of means MULTIPLY so the numeric answer is 43 times 43 which is 1849
Some got the right answers but didn't follw the instructions to join the answers without spaces to make a password, so it would have failed to give entry.
Capitalization is usually critical in passwords so the answer would have been.
AzureSnowdrop1849
As Eric (on my school site) points out: by the rules you could also spell out the number part.
AzureSnowdroponethousandeighthundredandfortynine
Quote: billwill @ February 6 2009, 12:11 PM GMTAzureSnowdroponethousandeighthundredandfortynine
That's hilarious. No,really. Next answer will be
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
And the next
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
And so on...
Heh, Heh
Just found this on the reCaptcha website. http://recaptcha.net/faq.html
Are you a spammer using this service to break other CAPTCHAs?
You found us out! Ok, just kidding. No, we're not spammers trying to break other people's CAPTCHAs by funneling them through our service and getting our users to solve them for us. reCAPTCHA is a university project with funding from reputable sources. If we were spammers, our department would fire us!
====================
One can of course believe everything that a website says.... 
Me, I go FIRST by who owns the site. and as I showed above they are anony mice.
Yes dear. 
Quote: Aaron @ February 5 2009, 11:24 PM GMTI'm not sure where to even start answering this. It's a reasonably well known, reputable system. If you think your site is that important and that upsing someone else's system is too dangerous, then that's a judgement for you. The front page says it's copyright Carnegie Mellon, and just a couple of clicks will confirm that for you on CM's own site.
In any case, how would any other users know that YOUR site isn't run by these pesky 'Internet crooks'? To be totally blunt, it doesn't exactly look professional.
Quote: Aaron @ February 6 2009, 2:41 PM GMTYes dear.
>The front page says it's copyright Carnegie Mellon,
>and just a couple of clicks will confirm that
>for you on CM's own site.
Lets be clear I don't seriously believe that reCaptcha is run by crooks and not part of Carnegie Melion University.
But Nothing on a website other than a https page with a certificate signed by a recognised Cerrtificate Authority can prove it belongs to any particular organization. Cetainly a copyright notice cannot convey that and any link that leads to a page on the university site itself, might be just that a stolen copy of the link pointing to a real website & real people.
You need an EXTERNAL trusted source of information to confirm the identity of a website. A Certificate Authority does this because you know that a trusted CA will not issue a certificate without independently checking the credential of the applicant. Thats why the certificates are expensive.
Indulgence? And the Encyclopedia Brittanica too. Oyster is a colour according to Dulux.
There must be easier ways to verify a human? Why not get them to fax over a photocopy of their arse?
>There must be easier ways to verify a human?
You mean:
Please stick your finger or other body protuberance in the DNA sampler, which you can order by clicking here
Quote: billwill @ February 6 2009, 5:12 PM GMTCetainly a copyright notice cannot convey that and any link that leads to a page on the university site itself, might be just that a stolen copy of the link pointing to a real website & real people.
There is no link to the university. But anyone wishing to check the project's validity need only go to CM's website, stick 'reCAPTCHA' in the search box, and see the results returned for confirmation.
In any case, a link can easily be checked for its validity as to whether it's, for example, paypal.com, or whether it's paypal.com.estonianfreedom.eu.