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.NET seems to make everything easier

Back when I used Overture, I always thought it was kind of a cool security feature where you had to type in letters in a graphic that is, theoretically, not machine readable. This deters automated attacks. It occurred to me that'd be a nice feature for the forum registration.

I never really played with anything graphical in .NET, aside from reading a little of the Managed DirectX 9 Kick Start. I also did some image resizing on the crappy little game site I did. From what little I knew about stuff in the Drawing namespace, I figured it couldn't be that hard to generate a GIF out of an HttpHandler with some text on it.

I was right. It's like a dozen lines of code, and that includes code to draw some random lines on it and move the characters around. It generates the text and saves it to Session.

Once you can find a good example, or encounter some of the better documentation, it's like you can do anything on .NET. What's even more exciting is that once you learn one area, you adapt quickly to other areas. I'm an ASP.NET guy, but Windows forms are easy enough. Graphics aren't that hard, and after reading a little of a beginning game programming book, that's not hard either.

I'm generally too busy creating things to get as academic as a lot of bloggers do, but it's fun to see that new stuff can come so easily in .NET.

4 Comments

  • Bye bye blind and vision-deficient users. You're not welcome.

  • I guess they'll have to e-mail someone to get registered. I've had too many automated attack attempts to not do something, so if you have a more clever solution, do let me know.

  • As long as there are other means to make a site accessible for registration, I wouldn't consider that a faux pas. I know that I tend to forget about accessability in a site and probably have far too many graphics without alt tags. For sites that use graphical buttons for navigation, that would be a far greater mistake.



    DoS attackes come in many forms now. I blame the people behind those for making the internet a more difficult place than it has to be. Maybe the solution would be to simply have everyone get a digital signature with which they could apply for a license to connect to the internet which would then be registered with their ISP to gain access. Do bad things and your license gets revoked. Now which would be worse, a policed internet or a site requiring visual ability?

  • E-mailing doesn't sound so bad, just e-mail the user a link that will complete the registration. But that has another problem - you will have to disallow multiple registrations from a single e-mail address and even then it will still allow your site to be turned into mass mailing beast.



    What you could do is to pick random names for your input fields and include encrypted BLOB with those names and something unique (such as the request IP address or current time) in a hidden field.

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