Providing machine unintelligible human understandable information on a communications network

摘要

Various methods are disclosed for disguising information such as an e-mail address so that it may be published on a web page and be legible or understandable to a human whilst being unintelligible to a web robot or spider address collection program. The methods disclosed include, converting text into a graphic, sound or video file, replacing characters of the text with similar or equivalent characters and adding obviously superfluous letters and words to the address, (known as munging or mungeing). The method may also comprise encoding the address or a media file containing the address into a Java (RTM) applet. Also claimed are various methods to make text in the form of a graphic file less readable by OCR style character recognition, these methods include the use of alphanumeric backgrounds, low contrast colour-schemes and textured backgrounds.