Subject: Re: [Asrg] Re: Asrg Digest, Vol 11, Issue 12

From: Markus Stumpf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 01:10:58 +0200

On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 10:19:26AM -0800, Douglas Campbell wrote:
> That said, consider the C/R system used in the titankey patent (yes, I
> know prior art exists, but that's the system I think everyone here is
> aware of); that system presents a problem they believe that only a human
> can solve.  If they are correct.  a human must perform the response.
> (they've chosen the sample problem of presenting 4 numbers in an image and
> requiring the human to send the numbers as characters back in a response;
> this is the identical C/R system used by godaddy.com to shield their whois
> service, for instance).

Such C/R systems will never be widely deployed.

The casual user will never ever be able to manage them. My mother has a
Linux box with email and web and is quite happy and able to manage what
she needs. Sometimes she and her friends notice that they both have email
access and exchange addresses.
I am 99.9% sure neither of them will successfully handle the C/R requests,
because they are simply to confused (and they are German language based,
their english is rather bad).
My mom sent an email to a french company to buy a special product.
It worked, even with the limited knowledge of english. But she received back
an automated message in french which she did not understand (neither did I,
a friend helped out, it was simply a reception ack). She would never have been
able to follow the instructions (nor would I have been) if this had been a C/R.

More and more sites follow the "trend" to make the contact to customers only
via web based forms and not accept email any longer (like the clueful ppl at paypal
where you send an email to abuse to notify them about an active phishing site
and you get back an auto answer which redirects you to a webbpage which you
can't use unless you are a paypal customer. So I stopped sending notifications
about paypal phishing attacks that hit my spamtrap accounts, and I will surely
never become a paypal customer with their "security" policy).
Now how would I ever know which eMail address to whitelist prior to making
contact in my C/R system? [email-masked]? *@*?
So I have to sit there and check all my dangling C/R requests to see if one of
them is from those website I want to make contact to. Really helpful.

Unless there are automated methods for handling C/R it is a system for some
freaks that mainly annoys everyone else.

	\Maex

-- 
SpaceNet AG            | Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0
Research & Development |       D-80807 Muenchen    | Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299
"The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally
 proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin"

_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg