Andrew Wirtanen » Webdev

Chroma-Hash makes confirming your password easier

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:53:56 +0000

One of the most frustrating things on the Internet is when you have to type in a password twice. Sometimes, a website will force you to hit the “submit” or “log in” button before it tells you that the passwords don’t match! Chroma-Hash is a jQuery plugin that securely generations a color bar for each password field. If the color bars don’t match, then the passwords don’t match.

I love this idea, but of course it wouldn’t work as well if you are color blind (or blind, for that matter).

[Chroma-Hash Demo via information aesthetics]

AT&T Hates the Drop-Down List

Andrew Wirtanen — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:38:57 +0000

There are many things that web designers can do to improve usability, but tampering with the Drop-Down List is not one of them. The only flaw of the Drop-Down List is that novice users may not know there is more than one option. The only visual cue to novice users have is the arrow. AT&T took it away at one of the most important parts of their website:

It’s interesting to me that someone looked at the Drop-Down List, and decided it needed to be changed. If only there was a usability specialist there to hold up a stop sign and redirect that energy.

CAPTCHA Isn’t Working

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:17:30 +0000

Here is an interesting fact: People spend 150,000 hours a day typing in CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) codes. Some people don’t mind it, and say that the CAPTCHA instills trust in the site because it appears more secure. However, a lot of people are complaining, and with good reason. Some CAPTCHAs are incredibly difficult because they are trying to confuse OCR-capable bots, but they end up confusing humans too.

What can we do instead? Well, the solution(s) needs to be accessible to those hard of hearing or visually impaired. The W3C laid out some solutions back in 2005. The reCAPTCHA project is also working on it. They have digitized over 2 million unrecognizable (via OCR screen reading technology) words that are easier to read than the standard code (see the image below). Another way to go about it may be to have people watch a video and type in what they see. Images would not work (e.g. typing “dog” when you see a picture of a dog) because there are only a limited number of images that could be used (see Security Now episodes #101-102 for more).

I think the reCAPTCHA project along with auditory CAPTCHAs may be the best solution.

Firefox 2.0.0.5, Adblock Plus and Google AdSense

Andrew Wirtanen — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:27:38 +0000

If you’re having trouble logging in to Google AdSense, you’re not alone.

It turns out that the combination of Firefox 2.0.0.5 and the Adblock Plus add-on prevent the login page from displaying for Google Adsense. Google’s Inside AdSense blog suggests clearing your cache and cookies and disabling the Adblock add-on in order to log in.

I think I will just load up a different web browser (maybe the new Flock 0.9.0.1).