[ale]OT It begins... (jumping into the middle)

[kjkrum at comcast.net (Kevin Krumwiede)]

On Wed, 04 Feb 2004 21:24:52 -0500
Jim Popovitch <jimpop at yahoo.com> wrote:

> yourself exposed.  The same concept applies to "obfuscating" email
> addresses.  If they can be read by a human, they can be read by a
> machine.  I like the image substitution idea, but remember it can be
> OCR'ed... unless it is near impossibe to read (see above comments).

You're right, they *can* be read by a machine.  However, obfuscating
them makes it less likely that they will be.  There are countless ways
of obfuscating an email address so that it can still be read by a human.
 Any given harvester bot will *not* be looking for every single
variation.  Likewise, something as simple as changing the name of a
resource or running a server on a non-standard port may do nothing to
stop a determined attacker specifically targeting your systems, but it
*will* stop most worms, viruses, and skript kiddies dead in their
tracks.  If you evaluate risk as a product of how potentially damaging
something could be vs. how likely it is to occur, then simple measures
like these should not be discounted.