Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re: If you are still using Ubuntu... (Score 1) 259

I'm curious to know if you've ever actually used it?

I'm not out to start a flame war or anything...

I been Gentoo/Funtoo for a long time (7-ish years I think) and gotta say I prefer it over various other systems I've used.

I use Funtoo on my primary workstation, laptop, and a mix of Funtoo/Gentoo on various servers (bare metal and virtualized) and it works great.

Comment Re: SSD or GTFO (Score 1) 201

I bought a cheap 7" Android 4.1 tablet from a company called Mediasonic in July 2012.

I bought it for my kids, and got it on sale for about $80 (+tax & shipping).

My kids are (now) 2 and three years old.

Surprisingly the tablet still works despite constant abuse from my kids. I should havr bought two, but I didnt think my kids would fight over it as much as they do.

Comment Re: I've never used CAPTCHA'S (Score 1) 558

I didn't want to get too indepth but I have covered that issue simply by using autocomplete="off" on thr form, and input elements.

To take it even further I generate the form field 'name' & 'id' tag attributes at random on page generation, and store a 'map' in the session data to un-obfuscate it on the submitted page. My session handling implementation prevents session hijacking, also.

Comment Re: I've never used CAPTCHA'S (Score 1) 558

The specific reason I suggest an external CSS file is to rule out simple parsing of the DOM/CSS. Also because I put everything in cacheable, minified CSS files. Just a matter of preference, really. I intentionally avoid Javascript solutions to make it simpler for me, and so I don't rule out the odd user using NoScript or similar. As others have mentioned, it is very commonly used. And typically inneffective on high traffic sites. I run a business doing design/development/hosting where 80% of my clients are local SMB's (although I am currently in the process of expanding into virtual server hosting, but that is another story). The described methods work for me and my clients. There are clearly much more complex routes you could take, but usually at a cost of causing more problems than it is worth. Just my opinion, though.

Comment I've never used CAPTCHA'S (Score 5, Informative) 558

I've been developing websites over 10 years and have never needed a captcha system.

This is how I always go about it:

1) Include a form input element labelled as something common, like a telephone number but on a registration form that would never actually require a telephone number. Hide the parent div using CSS in an external CSS file. When the form is submit, check to see if the element is filled out. If it is, simply display a message that you think their registration may be automated and to try again. If it continues, please contact us by other means (phone, email, etc) and we will help them through it.

2) Time the registration from the time the page is loaded to the time it is submit, if its less than 10 seconds, do the same as above, simply display a message saying you think their registration is automated and to try again, etc.

When used in conjunction I feel I've cut out 99.9999% of spam or false registrations. The timing method has to be done server side and stored in a session, and is fairly involved so not easy to do properly if you are new to web development. There is also the issue of someone hitting the back button to try again after a failed submission (if you don't use client-side validation), and them submitting from a cached page, but can be worked around if you know what you are doing.

Obviously its not bullet proof, and if the CSS file doesn't load then someone would see the extra form element. But its a small price to pay for effective protection.

Anyone else have other methods they use?

Slashdot Top Deals

"The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain." -- G. Fitch

Working...