fsckd

Captcha

29.3.2009

Bots started posting spam here this morning, so I implemented my own captcha based on FIGlet. I may eventually switch to reCAPTCHA, but it didn't work to my liking last time I implemented it.

FIGlet offers several benefits over traditional captchas at this time. First, FIGlet doesn't have to do any CPU intensive image generation. FIGlet is also a much simpler program in general, which makes it more malleable to the developer as compared to something such as PIL. And most important (at least for now), every capcha bot that I have seen is based on OCR. Because FIGlet captchas output ASCII rather than an image, the bot would first have to take a snapshot of the website and crop out the relevant portion. This would end up being quite a CPU intensive process for the malware. Thus, ASCII captchas are usually overlooked in search of an easier target.

• Captcha,
• Django,
• Python

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