Posts by Sean O'Connor

Image v Question

> At a web site that I help manage, image-based CAPTCHA was recently implemented

> to replace text-based CAPTCHA which had been cracked by spam bots for a long time.

I used to get about 5 porn-spam-bots a day on my phpBB forums once they had figured out the built in image CAPTCHA system. I switched to a simple question based system which asks a random question like "What colour is the sky?" and I've not had one bot sign up for the last two years. Sure, it's not a multi-lingual system but if that's not a problem for you it really seems to work.

Excellent news

If all Bit Torrent sites were shut down and there was a way to prevent apps from being easily copied between computers I'd sell my Windows games for $4 instead of $20 - like I do on the iPhone. I hope they go to jail and lose all the ad money they've made off the back of honest developers.

@ac

> So, how does that FACT fit in with the theory that all copies equal a lost sale? Tell me!

It's irrelevant whether copying reduces the number of sales a developer makes or not. Why can't you understand that it's not up to you what you do with my copyrighted material? If I write a game it's up to me what the price is, it's up to me how it's sold and it's up to me how it's used. If you don't like that then just don't buy it.

Environmentalists to blame

"We now know that the decline in the mid 20th Century is more linked to the huge aerosol emissions associated with the rapid industrialisation of the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in North America, the USSR and China, much of which was driven by high sulphur coal. As these economies gradually switched to cleaner coal and increasingly to oil and gas; and began to limit industrial emissions, the skies cleared and temperatures began to rise."

So Global Warming is actually caused by environmentalists then? If they hadn't insisted on us switching to cleaner coal etc... we wouldn't have rising global temperatures. When can we expect an apology from them for destroying our planet?

New law?

Maybe there should be a law that allowed you to swap names with one of your parents when you got to 16? I'd love to see the look on that girl's mum's face when she realised that her name from now on was Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Or Dad's name from now on was Fat Boy.

Off by default

Why don't they just make Link Scanner off by default? I left it on for my father-in-law because he's new to computers but everybody in the office here has disabled the Add On in their browser to remove it.

Stop building more houses

As there's a problem with traffic in Cambridge why are thousands more houses being built on the outskirts (eg Arbury Park and Northstowe) ? Just a wild guess, but isn't that going to make the problem even worse?

@Anonymous Coward

> I love this lot!

You wouldn't if you'd spent the last few years writing some software and then you saw it being downloaded for free on a Bit Torrent site.

Easy to disable

Just click on Tools | Add-ons and then disable AVG Safe Search

CAPTCHAS on phpBB

Just from my own experience I used to use CAPTCHAs on my phpBB forums and I'd get about 5 spammers registering a day. I changed to using a simple question system which asked a random question like "what is five plus two? or, what colour is the sky?" and I haven't had a single spam registration for nearly a year now.

Scrap it still

Because VAT and company tax is so complicated I end up spending £1,000 a year on an accountant so I can avoid paying slightly more than that in tax. If it was all made simple I'd sort it out myself and then even if taxes were put up I could afford to pay that grand to a teacher or a nurse.

I can understand luxury taxes on booze and fags etc... but wouldn't life be so much simpler (and cheaper) for businesses if most of them didn't have to employ an army of accountants to figure out VAT?

Why use it then?

If this is such an issue for generating SSL keys then why don't those programs use their own random number generators instead of using Windows' one?

Personally I've found it a godsend that the random number generator routine has stayed the same all through every 32 bit Windows. That way you can use it in games to create random maps for example that will be the same on any version of Windows if you use the same seed number.

Don't blame MS if you're using their simple random number routine when you need something a bit more sophisticated. Get off your arse and write your own.