underwhelm - Slashdot User

Submission + - Apple Developing iPhone and "Smart" Phone

Submitted by anaesthetica on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @12:39AM

anaesthetica writes: According to AppleInsider, Apple is not only working on a cellphone + mp3 player iPhone, but is working on a second model designed to be a smart phone, highly integrated with Mac OS and .Mac. The smart phone has gone through several iterations, as the notoriously demanding Mr. Jobs ordered the elite team working on the phone to redesign and re-engineer their prototypes. Capabilities are reported to include Front Row interface, syncing contacts and iCal with .Mac, "call ahead", iChat video conferencing integration, WiFi, and a slide-out keyboard. Too good to be true?

Submission + - CAPTCHA harder to break using animations

Submitted by

mlemos

on Wednesday December 06, 2006 @12:20AM

mlemos writes: "CAPTCHA validation is often used to prevent robots from abusing Web site resources. Usually CAPTCHA methods employ text written on fuzzy graphical images that the users must recognize.

However, there are already anti-CAPTCHA capable robots that employ artificial intelligence to reckon the text automatically.

László Zsidi is a PHP Web developer that has written an harder to break CAPTCHA solution. It consists in generating animated GIF images that exhibit the validation text.

Since the text never appears all at once in each of the animated frames, this solution certainly raises the bar in terms of difficulty for the robots to guess the validation text, making it very hard to defeat, if possible at all. There is an example screenshot that shows that this PHP component can be used to render an animated CAPTCHA with a 3D light effect running over the validation text.

The solution can run on most PHP installations as it only requires the GD library to render the animated graphic frames. László also provides another pure PHP class that is necessary to assemble the generated animated CAPTCHA frames into a single animated GIF image.

László just won the latest edition of the PHP Programming Innovation award for this achievement."

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