Here Be The Dragons

AT&T assigned a Captcha system to their order status script to defeat the page, the only problem is that they pay the wrong people. If AT&T is listening let me give you a little insight onto the two major flaws of their idea.

• Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart or better known as CAPTCHA, (clearly someone who was extremely over paid came up with this obnoxiously long acronym) was designed to filter out artificial intelligence from performing a function and allowing a human to pass through to complete an objective, like submitting a form, or an order check in this case. I’m curious to know who in the depths of AT&T’s corporate bat cave suggested “Hey, let’s put Captcha on the form to stop these shenanigans!” I only ask because they clearly never through to address what exactly they were trying to do in the first place since this script is designed to interface with humans and not artificial intelligence.
• Even if the script was to use artificial intelligence to gather the information than I guess we would be completely foiled, except for the fact that CAPTCHA was defeated years ago.  The source code for these bots is available freely to download for “educational” purposes throughout the internet.

Which in my opinion makes this person over paid and useless.  If AT&T really wanted to stop these scripts there is only one way to do it and the only way they are ever going to figure it out, short of hiring a better staff is to email me and ask directly..or they could call me on my iPhone.

Oh and here’s the new source code.

http://www.herebethedragons.com/iphone-queue.rar

For those of you interested in the source code, I will keep an updated version of the source available at this link for download. The base code was made by iPhone Convert and than hosted here where it was kind enough to be shared with me, I modified it and am passing it along to anyone else who wants to use it while it lasts. Please don’t abuse it.

http://www.herebethedragons.com/iphone-queue.rar
(Updated: 7/24/08 - 7:38 pm est)

Some people have been asking, how do I find my order number?  Well, there is a few ways you can find it, the first and easiest way is to take a look at your receipt, it’s a six digit number and I will scan a copy of my receipt (when I find it) to show you exactly where it’s at.

The slightly more complicated way is to use AT&T’s Order Status page and grab it from there.

This is obviously not finished or set up as its a side project with no actual intentions other than to exist.  Thanks to yet again another poorly launched release for the much anticipated iPhone 3G, many of us are now sitting around waiting for the Direct Fulfilment to be fulfilled, so while you wait and watch your order slowly rise to the top, here’s a simple script to help you do it courtesy of ‘Jeremy’ over at www.whereismydamniphone.com’s to help us monitor our iPhone queue status!

Thank you!