Avoiding spam scraping
The recent spate of people requesting Joost invites all over the web, mainly in digg.com comments. Has led to some people setting up websites to "distribute" their invites. Whilst I'm not doubting the integrity of most web users. I did wonder whether this was a bit of an opportunity for the bad people. You know the sort, those with nefarious aims.
Most of the 250+ digg comments for the story are people leaving their e-mail addresses for invites. I've even hada couple three on this blog I get about 6 readers.
The entire thing reminded me of a rather nifty trick I spotted the other day for obfuscation of your address online. It was after my meeting with Harriet Harman MP I was intent on e-mailing her some evidence of a point someone made at our Q & A to which at the time she seemed reticent to admit.
Anyway, on HH's site you'll notice the obligatory contact Harriet page. As is the fashion these days her e-mail is listed in the name at domain dot com format. However what I thought was pretty cute was the mailto: link that was also present was also somewhat concealed. its a technique I've never spotted before. It both hid the address from the plain site of the spiders / bots etc. and still yielded a new message window when clicked upon.
You can see the link actually calls a javascript function called "linkTo_UnCryptMailto('arguement')" the syntax of the incorrectly named function aside (surely it should be unencrypt() ?)
Briefly what the function is doing is a nifty bit shift on the string passed to it, then making this the link that the browser acts, I assume a correct mailto: link.
It isn't big, it's not that clever it just caught my attention. Well done her designers for putting some level of protection in. On further reading I found the site is powered by Typ03, is this part of their standard install ?
Most of the 250+ digg comments for the story are people leaving their e-mail addresses for invites. I've even had
The entire thing reminded me of a rather nifty trick I spotted the other day for obfuscation of your address online. It was after my meeting with Harriet Harman MP I was intent on e-mailing her some evidence of a point someone made at our Q & A to which at the time she seemed reticent to admit.
Anyway, on HH's site you'll notice the obligatory contact Harriet page. As is the fashion these days her e-mail is listed in the name at domain dot com format. However what I thought was pretty cute was the mailto: link that was also present was also somewhat concealed. its a technique I've never spotted before. It both hid the address from the plain site of the spiders / bots etc. and still yielded a new message window when clicked upon.
You can see the link actually calls a javascript function called "linkTo_UnCryptMailto('arguement')" the syntax of the incorrectly named function aside (surely it should be unencrypt() ?)
Briefly what the function is doing is a nifty bit shift on the string passed to it, then making this the link that the browser acts, I assume a correct mailto: link.
It isn't big, it's not that clever it just caught my attention. Well done her designers for putting some level of protection in. On further reading I found the site is powered by Typ03, is this part of their standard install ?
posted by M at 11:17 PM
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