•Re: Re: Password hacker killer

[merlyn]

Beware. That may be in violation of ADA rules. I got ripped on publicly for writing code to do that.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

[eric256]

What about challenging them with simple pseudo riddles. Although not perfect it could work. With enough variation in the questions and the format you could make it difficult.

 Please enter the answer to the following question:
(number of days in a year) + (the hours in a day) + (the number of wis
+e men)

People friendly, computer not. At least it would stimulate growth in NLP and common sense bots :)

___________
Eric Hodges

[htoug]

That suggestion is very culture dependent. I think I know the answer to your question:
365+24+7
hmm... or is it 365+12+3?
or 365+24+3 or...

You get the idea?

It gets worse if you use questions that you are 'certain' the users knows the answer to.
Eg. how many players on a football team?
Answer: 7, 11 or whatever is the normal number in your context.

[eric256]

Well I thought hours in a day was pretty much a standard. The point either way was that the riddles could be constructed to either be 'known' or look up able. Its not an ideal solutions, i'm not sure there is an idea solution, but if you want to make sure its a person on the other end then make them do something people normaly do better than computers. In general people will be better at finding/knowing answers to a mass of questions. Also you could have three sets of riddles and the person could only answer 2 and still pass, or you could have a set of region dependent riddles, letting the user select his/her region before hand.

How many planets are occupied by humans + how many moons does earth have?

how many days are in a week + how many days are in a weekend?

brides in a wedding + eggs in a dozen + sodas in a six pack

___________
Eric Hodges

[JackHammer]

WOW! Thanks for the heads up, that could have bitten me in the butt hard... I had considered that for a system I am working on, guess that one goes off the drawing board now :) Just goes to show, no matter how much you think out a solution, there is always something lurking around the corner that you just don't expect.