Ticketmaster.com and Word Images

Does anyone know how sites like Ticketmaster.com creates the "Word
Image" used for ticket purchase verification?
Do they generate the image on-the-fly from a dictionary, or do the
images pre-exist and they are pulled from a DB along with the word.

John

http://www.zend.com/zend/tut/tutorial-mehmet1.php
--
Aaron Gould
agould@partscanada.com
Web Developer
Parts Canada


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Manko" <xerid@adelphia.net>
To: "PHP General" <php-general@lists.php.net>
Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 10:16 AM
Subject: [php] Ticketmaster.com and Word Images


> Does anyone know how sites like Ticketmaster.com creates the "Word
> Image" used for ticket purchase verification?
> Do they generate the image on-the-fly from a dictionary, or do the
> images pre-exist and they are pulled from a DB along with the word.
>
> John
>
>
>
> --
> PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/)
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>

--- John Manko <xerid@adelphia.net> wrote:
> Does anyone know how sites like Ticketmaster.com creates
> the "Word Image" used for ticket purchase verification?

There are different ways for doing this. The simplest is to generate the image
yourself, and you can use a pseudo-caching method to pull them statically if
they are not already generated.

This method can still be automated, but it is at least more difficult than
writing a simple script, as it requires some OCR. If you want to go the extra
mile, check out this site:

http://www.captcha.net/

gimpy-r is what Yahoo! uses for their registration. These images are extremely
difficult to reliably read with a computer program, so they offer much stronger
protection against automated attacks.

If you specifically want to know what TicketMaster/CitySearch uses, you should
ask on the mod_perl mailing list, because a few of those guys work there.

Hope that helps.

Chris

=====
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