[Edbrowse-dev] Images

[Edbrowse-dev] Images

[Karl Dahlke]

> Webvism is both a service and a Firefox plugin for solving captchas.

I'm guessing it sends the img url to some website, maybe with yourcredentials,
perhaps as cookies, then the site posts it, some user solves it,
and returns the letters to you, which you type in,
or cut&paste in, or maybe fills in automatically.

An edbrowse function could do all of this,
if we knew how it worked inside, except, there is no easy way to get the url.

As of today, the alt text of an image is in brackets,
unless of course that image is a clickable url whence it is in braces.
I'm not thrilled about brackets since text is sometimes in brackets anyways.
Rarely though is text naturally in braces or angles <>.
So brackets are ok I guess for an image but if you have other suggestions I'm open.
Maybe ~picture of a house~.
Those are eused less frequently.

Anyways let's say this is in place, then you want the edbrowse function
to pull out the url from the src= attribute, but oops,
this is entirely lost through browsing.
It's not clickable, so I didn't particularly care about it.
Visual browsers however let you right click on a picture
to download it or whatever.
So imagine that I carried some internal tags for the image, like I do with hyperlinks
and form fields etc.
If these tags were present then the A command could bring up the url for that picture,
just like it does for links and so on.
Then the edbrowse function could grab the url and send it to Webvism
and scrape the letters off and ^ back and maybe even put them into the next input field.
Feasible, if I retained the tags and src reference for images.
Wouldn't be a big job, but not trivial and probably not our highest priority.

Karl Dahlke

Re: [Edbrowse-dev] Images

[Adam Thompson]

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On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 03:37:22PM +0000, Karl Dahlke wrote:
> > Webvism is both a service and a Firefox plugin for solving captchas.
> 
> I'm guessing it sends the img url to some website, maybe with yourcredentials,
> perhaps as cookies, then the site posts it, some user solves it,
> and returns the letters to you, which you type in,
> or cut&paste in, or maybe fills in automatically.
> 

Either that or the image itself.  If it's used in realtime then you probably need to send the downloaded image as lots of captures generate different images each time they're loaded.

> An edbrowse function could do all of this,
> if we knew how it worked inside, except, there is no easy way to get the url.
> 
> As of today, the alt text of an image is in brackets,
> unless of course that image is a clickable url whence it is in braces.
> I'm not thrilled about brackets since text is sometimes in brackets anyways.
> Rarely though is text naturally in braces or angles <>.
> So brackets are ok I guess for an image but if you have other suggestions I'm open.

I'm fairly used to brackets, I think this comes from when I used to browse the
web with the links2 browser though so I don't mind. As long as any change is documented.
> Maybe ~picture of a house~.
> Those are eused less frequently.

That also works.

> 
> Anyways let's say this is in place, then you want the edbrowse function
> to pull out the url from the src= attribute, but oops,
> this is entirely lost through browsing.
> It's not clickable, so I didn't particularly care about it.
> Visual browsers however let you right click on a picture
> to download it or whatever.
> So imagine that I carried some internal tags for the image, like I do with hyperlinks
> and form fields etc.
> If these tags were present then the A command could bring up the url for that picture,
> just like it does for links and so on.
> Then the edbrowse function could grab the url and send it to Webvism
> and scrape the letters off and ^ back and maybe even put them into the next input field.
> Feasible, if I retained the tags and src reference for images.
> Wouldn't be a big job, but not trivial and probably not our highest priority.

It would certainly have its uses, but as you say it's not really high priority at the moment.

As for the webvism function, if it does indeed use the url rather than the
image then I wonder if one could unbrowse the page, search for the alt text,
use a regex to extract out the url and send it to the site that way?

This approach wouldn't be very robust or nice to implement but could be made to
work in cases where some details about the image's alt text are known.

Cheers,
Adam.

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Re: [Edbrowse-dev] Images

[Chris Brannon]

Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net> writes:

> I'm guessing it sends the img url to some website, maybe with yourcredentials,
> perhaps as cookies, then the site posts it, some user solves it,
> and returns the letters to you, which you type in,

I don't know how it works.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't grab an
image URL.  Why?  There's too much variability.  A lot of sites probably
use the URL in conjunction with cookies or whatnot.  I suppose the
plugin could ship your cookies to webvism, but that's a security
minefield that no one really wants to enter.
My suspicion is that it extracts the images from the page somehow,
possibly using the DOM tree to find the image associated with the
current form.  Those are then sent as actual graphic files to the
service.  That would be the best and safest way to do it, I should
think.

-- Chris

[Edbrowse-dev] Images

[Karl Dahlke]

> I'm fairly used to brackets, I think this comes from when I used to browse the
> web with the links2 browser though so I don't mind.

Wow. I knew it looked familiar but couldn't remember why.
That was it.
Good, then this convention makes sense.
Although it doesn't come up very often because most images are clickable hyperlinks, hence the braces.
Well braces are sort of enhanced brackets, so again good.
I'll scan through and see if I documented this anywhere.

Karl Dahlke