Jim Barter : Digital Imagination

Upgraded, possibly not buggy.

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Read this story on the BBC about transmitting electrical power via magnetic waves, ‘wireless electric’, and thought “This sounds familiar…”

Sure enough…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

…took you long enough mate…

For work I’m working on re-ordering the WCAG2.0 Draft Guidelines Quick Reference into A, AA and AAA order - like WCAG 1.0 was… - you can see them here…

http://www.jimbarter.co.uk/a-aaa.html

feel free to use ‘em if you want, but bare in mind they are a WIP and are based on the w3c’s *DRAFT* guidelines.

…Upgrading WordPress to 2.2 - there will be a slight hiccup in the design of this site…

…and after deleting an unused plugin that had created 250,000!!! files, it should be a bit quicker too!

This number kills facists…

…so googles servers go tits up for some parts of the net, and various websites using maps, addwords, and the like all take ages to respond - if they respond at all!

…why can’t I find any news about this elsewhere?

..oh yeah - google died…

just upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 - painless, I know the design is “fubar” expect a “re-alignment” soon…

…well it didn’t take long.

The Grauniad publish an article saying how two guys broke the security in the new ’secure’ British Passport…

…I’d like to say I’m surprised, but I’m not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1950226,00.html

We all know ‘captchas’ are bad…

We all know they are a necessary evil…

…but do we know what we actually use them for?

The assumption is we are using them to detect humans and allow them - not true, we are actually using them to try and detect bots and block them.

And this is the captcha’s flaw - because humans are flawed, captcha’s very often trip people up.

But there is something we seem to have forgotten - the browser. Bot’s don’t use Firefox, or IE, or Opera etc. They are custom browsing scripts.

…so here’s the good bit.

Rather than trying to detect the human in the system, could we use javascript to detect the browser, hunt through the DOM for some (and it could be variable) browser feature that the Bot’s don’t have? such as the ability to upload an image? or install a plugin?

If javascript is available - yes.

If javascript is not available, then we could still use an image and alt text - the ‘old fashioned’ way, but a real human user should never need to see the captcha, unless they can’t use javascript, and then there should be no need to scramble the image.

users of screenreaders with javascript enabled would be allowed in, users of screenreaders with javascript disabled would read the alt text of the image and be allowed in.

Bot’s would be detected as ‘not browsers’ and be blocked.

…well thats my theory anyway.