61–65 of 65 posts
Why not encode the domain strings into an image? OCR requires a lot more programming effort compared to a text-based content scraper
I think that's the basic idea. He could spend his time making it harder to scrape, like the bar across the steering wheel. Some people would be deterred, others wouldn't, and time would be wasted all around.
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Many sites won't accept email addresses with + in them, because many devs have extremely wrongheaded ideas about validation. I used to have a first.m.last@university.edu address and that one was touch-and-go as well due to the fact that the mailbox had two .'s in it. I actually had to file a support request to get Amazon Student to accept it, even. Nobody from a university with that scheme ever registered before? For…
My favorite is e-mails with three dots in them. Which is actually not a valid address - the RFC specifies that you must have a valid textual character between dots[1]. However, because of poor decisions by Japanese telcoms, a substantial chunk of their users have 'e-mails' associated with their mobile phones with three dots, breaking goddamn every sensible validation script. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#se…
[1] docomo customer with two dots in email
I'm not sure his method would prevent a headless scraper like CasperJS or PhantomJS from doing the dirty work, but nice technique nonetheless.
At least at the time of writing, if you had enough foresight and engineering time to set something like that up, you had enough foresight and engineering time to not make your system treat email addresses as meaningful identities.
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At least at the time of writing, if you had enough foresight and engineering time to set something like that up, you had enough foresight and engineering time to not make your system treat email addresses as meaningful identities.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but an extremely high percentage of the sites I have accounts on use my email address for authentication. Those that don't often suffer from username squatting. Maybe most sites are just doing it wrong, but what's the prevailing alternative?
If the website is doing things right, they have other means (like a CAPTCHA at the least, or phone verification, or you buying an item from them) before deciding that an email address really is an identity.
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but an extremely high percentage of the sites I have accounts on use my email address for authentication. Those that don't often suffer from username squatting. Maybe most sites are just doing it wrong, but what's the prevailing alternative?
Your email address isn't your identity . It's a name associated with your identity, but the identity itself is your account. Or put another way, not all valid email addresses are valid identities for these websites. If the website is doing things right, they have other means (like a CAPTCHA at the least, or phone verification, or you buying an item from them) before deciding that an email address really is an identit…
I realize this was a non-comprehensive list and I'm not trying to just attack it. I think I agree with the core assessment around what constitutes an identity. But short of some really draconian methods, I think you're basically trading off one insufficient method for another. And at that point, you may as well focus on making things easy for people, which typically means just working with email verification.
FWIW, when faced with Mailinator abuse I resorted to requiring a credit card number to sign up for a trial of my SaaS product. The abuse stopped immediately. But there were other impacts to the business as a result. I still debate the wisdom of it and how much of this should have been foresight. As a bootstrapped company, dealing with abuse was just a resource drain and forced me to focus my efforts on dealing with a segment of the population that was never going to give me money. Suffice to say, it was all very disheartening.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter.