[LINK] protecting online content - AFR technique

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 12:31:18PM +1000, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 12:12 PM 28/04/2008, Sylvano wrote:
>
>> The story text is effectively doubled, but there is even a little
>> more, since each of the two versions needs interleaved   between
>> the alternate characters to be inserted to implement the magic.
>
> I pointed to this example in a web-site design group last month. We
> took a look at the code and discovered the inserted spaces. I believe
> the workaround was a screen capture.

it would take a moderately-skilled perl hacker about 10 minutes to write
a LWP robot that scraped such pages and extracted the content.  maybe
an hour if they'd never used the LWP module before.

and if the technique is in common use, there will be a publicly
available script to do it in no time - which would make it as difficult
as just downloading the script and running it.

in other words, futile.


actually, worse than futile - it more than doubles the page size,
wasting bandwidth (and annoying users on slow links).  and there will
undoubtedly be rendering problems with different browsers.  

the technique is probably in conflict with accessibility requirements
(anyone tested it with Jaws?)

probably screws up google and other search-engine indexing too.

in short: futile, broken, probably illegal, and stupid.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>