---------- From: Ray Dillinger[SMTP:bear@sonic.net] Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 12:06 PM To: Dr. Evil Cc: cypherpunks@minder.net Subject: Linearized computations - was OCR

On 10 Aug 2001, Dr. Evil wrote:

...

blacked out. Cool! But I'm working on a different problem. Basically, I have a web site that lets you reserve domain names before you pay for them. I want to make sure that no loser out there decides to be cool and write a script which reserves every word in the dictionary, or every sequence of eight characters, or some moronic thing like that. So I will have the page display three characters, somewhat blurry, and say, "type these characters here!" If they don't match, you're not human! (Why didn't they think of this simple method in Terminator and Blade Runner?) This same moron could sit there and type domain names all day long, but that's enough punishment in itself.

I think text is the wrong approach. Put up some pictures, and a question - 'Click on the white bunny' 'Click on the chipmunk' 'Click on the Russian icon'. 'Click on the clowns nose' 'Click on the clown's right hand' Taking text, which is explicitly designed to be readable, and trying to find a degree of distortion which is human (but not machine) readable is probably a bad approach. Try something a 6 year old can do, but which is still a PhD thesis problem for computers. Peter