[SpamCop-List] Re: Pornographic Spam Assault

[Steven Maesslein]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 18:24:11 -0000, Porpoise coughed into spamcop and
left this in <d05121$i4f$1 at news.spamcop.net>:

> The PHP script that constructs the email addresses is not in the same file 
> as the one calling the function - it's called from within other scripts in 
> other files that build the pages somewhat dynamically, so the robot would 
> need to know how all the bits go together in order to make sense of it. I 
> think!  :-)

No, it wouldn't. 

PHP itself can't tell the difference between a bot and a browser. All it
knows is that has to stream data out to be sent over the network
connection by the webserver.

If all the parts of the script are sent to a browser then they'll also 
be sent to the 'bot.

The difference between PHP and the javascript approach is that the
*browser* interprets the javascript and converts the function call to an
<A> tag. A bot *won't* parse the javascript, or at least is less likely
to. With PHP it's the *server* that parses the code and outputs the
results to the browser/bot.

Javascript is interpreted client-side. PHP is interpreted server-side.

-- 
Steve

Windows is....
A 32-bit extension to a 16-bit graphical interface, sitting on
an 8-bit operating system, originally written for a 4-bit processor
by a 2-bit company without ONE BIT of common sense.