http://www.dralegal.org/cases/private_business/nfb_v_target.phpThe above link is to a news story that shows what is coming. Target a private company was sued over web accesability. Now the EU and the US government have their laws that thier sites must be accesable to the deaf mute and blind. But this law suit sets a leagal presidence for private sector sites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CaptchaCaptcha for those who do not know is the image you get when you sign up for sites. You have all seen them. The funky letyters and numbers that you must type in to prove you are human. Great idea, but it has its faults.
Number 1:
It has been broken. You read that right. You have to have some fairly distorted letters, blended colors and other funky crap to be fairly(notice I didn't say 100%) sure a bot will not be able to read it.
Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Computer_character_recognitionNumber 2: The blind are screwed. Thie disabled community are very offended by captch. Some of you say how do the blind surf the web? Look up screen readers. The one that comes to mind is JAWS
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws70fea.asphttp://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol4/accessibility_no14.htmSo you have security that unless you really put some thought into it(not used the code from zend.com or php.net) is pretty useless. And you lock out a growing section of netizens. What is the answer? The human brain. Computers do not tell jokes, they do not know cliches, Sure you can program them to have a pool of each to pull from, but how many can that pool effectivley hold?
Imagine a mod that allowed site admins to offer audio, video, image, text puzzels to prove human inteligence. The admin could upload a middi file that sounds like a top 20 hit. It plays you type in the band, or maybe the song title, or maybe it is random the info needed from the same audio bit.
Text could be simple things, why did the chicken cross the road? "to get to the other side".
Yes I know a bot can be coded to answer that. But if every admin could set up thier own questions, images, videos, audio, how efective is it to code a bot for one site? Then the admin changes everything. The bot is useless.
The user is offered a choice on authentication. Anyone intrested in Section 508 US government accesability compliance, here is the horses mouth
http://www.section508.gov/
