Backscatter CAPTCHA mod.

THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN TERMINATED
IT WILL NO LONGER BE DEVELOPED

For Webmasters who use phpBB2 forum and are sick of spambots.

Released under the same GPL license as the previous version of usercp_confirm.php

HOW IT WORKS: This is a very simple modification that instead of using grey fuzzy characters that can be OCRed by a robot, replaces the text with a "warbled" bit-pattern of 50% black, and 50% white pixels. When doing the background, the noise is also 50% black, and 50% white, but it is pseudo random. Also, to avoid the bit-patterns of the text from being a recognizable trait, the bit patterns, 10101010 and 01010101 for instance, are continously bumped left and right between characters, on each scan-line to insure a random set for each character.

WHY IT WORKS: Why it works, and why you can still see the characters, is actually an optical illusion! Perception of the characters is due to the neurons in your visual cortex being antagonized by a staccato triggering of your neurons, and setting up a wave function that causes text to appear.It's not really there, and if you zoom in on it, you will see it fade into the background as just a bunch of random pixels. If you average it, it has the same gaussian average as the rest of the image, so it fades out. If you contrast stretch it, you gain nothing as the contrast is allready at 100%, pure black and white. If you have a true analog neural-net in your robot, well, then this script will probably fail. Another boost, is making the image larger and smaller on a random basis to insure that certain characters would not have certain placements, a perceived error in the original version, that I am not sure whether or not fixing did any good.

INSTALLATION: Back up your original usercp_confirm.php in /includes/ . Drop in the new usercp_confirm.php . Test your registration system of the forum, as in go through and generate a test account to make sure everything is working absolutely right. If it is not, delete my file, and reinstall your backup.Please mail me with what the problem was, so I can either help, or try to rectify it.

FINAL NOTE: I have no doubt I have overlooked something. Script Kiddies running bots are stupid, the hackers who wrote the bots are not. When enough kiddies start whining and crying they can't boost their SEO rankings by spamming phpBB forums anymore, I am sure some black hat hacker looking to make a quick buck (read: Sell-Out) will devise a system to OCR my text generator.

I allready have ideas for 2 more generations ahead of this version, but, I sure would like to be lazy for awhile.Good Luck,
The future is here! Please see the CASPER page!