4 ms·

Have some random thoughts about the most crucial element of a challenge/response system.

• ben_w 8y ago
  xkcd 221?
  • TomVDB 8y ago
    Close enough! There really is an XKCD for everything...
    • dtech 8y ago
      To be honest, that joke is very common. A much older version of it exists in a Dilbert cartoon from 2001 [1], and it wasn't a new joke at that point. [1] https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25 https://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25
  • neogodless 8y ago
    Very close to a real world scenario. I usually bring it up to compare big teams to small. (Our small team was being replaced by a big, expensive team, and I found an issue in 15 minutes that the new team had created - despite sharing my findings immediately, it still took their team weeks to find it "on their own", admit to it, and finally fix it.) There was a CAPTCHA used to prevent bot spam on a contest entry portal. The code that randomized the image displayed was modified to be stored in an application cache that persisted across sessions (meaning every "user" saw the same image and could use the same answer). Guess how useful that was in preventing bot spam? (The fix was to delete one or two lines of code that were not only not helpful, but obviously harmful!)