[IP] more on President Bush using challenge-response for his email

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 07:02:30 -0400
To: Mike Masnick <mike@techdirt.com>
Cc: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Re: [IP] President Bush using challenge-response for his email

> (a) you email the President (b) instead
> of getting the email, you receive a reply telling you to go to a webpage
> (c) at that webpage, you need to perform certain tasks to prove you are
> human (though, the ones on the Whitehouse page are a bit more cumbersome
> than most C-R systems).

And of course makes it impossible to be heard if you don't have web
access, which is the case for some folks behind firewalls, connected by
non-IP networks, etc.  I haven't visited the site, but -- does the C/R
mechanism work with the browsers used by the blind?

More generally, challenge-response is a highly-hyped but
highly-inefficient and easily-subverted anti-spam mechanism.  As I've
pointed out elsewhere, it's pretty easy to get around a lot of C-R, and no
doubt spammers will do exactly that if and when it becomes more prevalent.
It's just another ineffective snake-oil "cure" for the symptoms of spam,
and like most of the others, it does NOTHING about the disease.

---Rsk


------ End of Forwarded Message

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