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Inside India's CAPTCHA Solving Economy
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Aug 30, 2008 08:19 AM
from the industries-exist-for-everything-these-days dept.
from the industries-exist-for-everything-these-days dept.
Anti-Globalism points out an analysis of India's CAPTCHA-solving industry posted at ZDNet. It begins:
"No CAPTCHA can survive a human that's receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-waged human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of data processing while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHAs, I'm already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India's major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation, logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier and the process more efficient."
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Now Even Photo CAPTCHAs Have Been Cracked 340 comments
MoonUnit writes "Technology Review has an interesting article about the way CAPTCHAS are fueling AI research. Following recent news about various textual CAPTCHAs being cracked, the article notes that a researcher at Palo Alto Research Center has now found a way crack photo-based CAPTCHAs too. Most approaches are based on statistical learning, however, so Luis von Ahn (one of the inventors of the CAPTCHA) says it is usually possible to make a CAPTCHA more difficult to break by making a few simple changes."
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Proof that (Score:5, Insightful)
you CANNOT stop advertising/spam. There is simply too much money in it. I think Ani said it best when she said "Fuck this time and place".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
best way to stop spam is by educating the recipient that it is bad to buy from a spammer.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Or, as the consensus on /. seems to be, we could just kill all the spammers in ritualistic fashion.
It could be the next extreme reality show for TV... Fear Factor Spam Edition! Have them go through the trials, eat pig rectums and get covered in bees, then the winner gets to shoot the other participants in the head - and then of course, we off the winner too!
Re:Proof that (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, even if no one ever bought a single thing from spammers, the spam would still continue. You see, spammers don't need to sell anything to make money; they only need to convince gullible merchants to pay them to spam. In fact, I suspect that this is the sole driving force between spam today; there is so much spam of such low quality that it seems highly implausible that there are enough suckers to support it all.
No, the real root problem is multi-level marketing, which turns suckers into salesmen who, having fallen for one scam already, will easily fall for another. MLM tricks people into buying huge quantities of merchandise that they can't sell, so they turn to spammers for help. That's why the overwhelming majority of spam is for the small handful of products which are sold using MLM. The rest is scams (which only need one person to fall for them) and viruses (which can persist long after their author has moved on).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately you can also bet that China (as all other governments) are going to use it to select "acceptable" viewpoints only.
There, fixed that for ya.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeaaaaah.... I'm going to have to ask you to look at all the Scandinavian countries....
"Doin' it wrong" is not a basic component of government. There are more and less corrupt systems.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't buy the "the only motivations are power and progeny" arguments. For one, they don't explain history. For example, how the last Russian Tsar was a huge reformer, despite that weakening his power base, for one.
Humans are complicated. Any system that treats them as simple, say by reducing their possible motivations to one or two, is flawed by nature.
No Laws please (Score:2)
Lawmakers are incompetent and unable to adjust to the realities of day-to-day changes in spam techniques.
I just with Gmail would go back to the "Invite only" approach, with SMS as a secondary measure, along with a remote possibility of snail-mail to cover everyone else. Unless we all use OpenID or some other general log-in function, small sites would be screwed by this approach.
Hrm, maybe that's a good argument for OpenID.
Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
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More Evidence for me (Score:5, Funny)
You can expand this to the food crisis, energy crisis, etc. bottom line is, there are too many people. And why? Because we're the top of the food chain. Because we heal ourselves, and live too long. Because someone that weighs 500 pounds lives alongside those fit for this society.
My proposal is to clone rapters. Then no longer would be be at the top of the food chain.. they could simply sculpt our society into one that we can manange. and lets face it, they could do it pretty effectively. Rapters are fast and intelligent, hunt in packs, and hell.. they can even open doors! Support rapter cloning!
So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)
...you're going to reduce the human population by cloning the U.S. military's Reporting and Planning Terminal [army.mil]?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you'll certainly reduce the human population on the Internet with threats like this:
http://www.sed.monmouth.army.mil/comm/cms/RAPTer.htm [army.mil] wants to load an applet.
GNU Classpath's security implementation is not complete.
HOSTILE APPLETS WILL STEAL AND/OR DESTROY YOUR DATA!
Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
> My proposal is to clone rapters
Aah, why bother with that hassle? Just let people kill of people randomly - it does the same job as raptors and we don't need to have the hassle of genetic enginering
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Your statement doesn't really work. You can't blame living too long or healing ourselves for overpopulation. Most countries that are first world have a birth rate that is less than 2.1 needed to sustain the population. Overpopulation is a function of poverty. Once you have money you start having less kids.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, he distinctly said raptErs, which pretty much refers to a type of console used by the U.S. Army (see post below). =)
If he said raptOrs, he might've been referring to producing his own line of 10,000RPM SATA hard drives -- which would be a good thing, since there's only one manufacturer in the market at the moment, if you don't want to go with them you need to go the SCSI/SAS route.
It would take a lot of time and effort, but you could probably wipe out humanity with them. A glass/ceramic/metal disk spi
This was quite predictable (Score:3, Insightful)
Provided you have a sufficient number of dedicated employees, any technical problem is solvable. So when we have densely populated areas with extremely low cost of sustaining life (i.e. warm underdeveloped countries), it's much more rational to assign thousands of locals to perform simple recurring actions than to hire an adequate number of qualified professionals to develop software capable of the same thing.
A list of measures that could help includes eradication of population in warm underdeveloped countries, and making the said countries either cold (or otherwise unsuitable for life without certain expenses) or much better developed, which would ruin this business model as far as I can see.
Temporary problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
or much better developed, which would ruin this business model as far as I can see.
It's starting to happen. Give it another 20 years and Indian wages will be high enough that this sort of stuff won't happen because Indian wages will be almost as high as a US worker's wages.
China, I think, will take a bit longer, but I think they'll end up using up their own labor that's coming off the farms and such for the most part during the later stages of their industrialization.
Heck US manufacturing goods exports and domestic production have been increasing recently, and that hasn't happened in years.
Parent
Re:Temporary problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then the problem will simply move elsewhere. There will always be someone at the bottom of the wage food chain, willing to work for relative peanuts.
This is already [forbes.com] happening [zdnet.co.uk].
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Then the problem will simply move elsewhere.
Then where else, if not China/India? The only other major non-industrialized areas I can think of are Africa. Africa only has a population of ~922 million. India alone has 1.13B, China 1.3B.
In addition, Africa is crippled by internal strife and warfare in ways that the other two aren't. Even if you toss in the Middle east, that's only another 197 million. South America is 371 million. And I wouldn't consider them unindustrialized.
Even if you add those three
Re: (Score:2)
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It's starting to happen. Give it another 20 years and Indian wages will be high enough that this sort of stuff won't happen because Indian wages will be almost as high as a US worker's wages.
Before that happens, Bill Gates will build new universities in other countries to keep the outsourcing race to the bottom alive. They can just iterate through a stack of countries. Don't expect it to help Hati or Papua New Guinea though - by the time of a few economies after India and China, software will write itself.
Not Bill Gate's problem (Score:2)
Excepting the conspiracy theories about BG, this is pretty much what I figure will happen. Outsourcing to India/China encompasses far more than software writing, after all.
Don't forget that once fully industrialized, China and India will be looking to outsource as well.
The other major possible population centers for replacing China and India tend to have some rather severe problems, starting with lower population levels, not to mention the civil wars, the lack of even basic infrastructure in many areas.
Not
Downward spiral... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's starting to happen. Give it another 20 years and Indian wages will be high enough that this sort of stuff won't happen because Indian wages will be almost as high as a US worker's wages.
Indian wages will rise and US wages will fall until they're in parity.
Our standard of living is falling here in the US (except for the very small minority of CEOs, politicians and stars). Yeah, it's rising in these third world countries, but the overall effect is that we'll never see the standard of living that our parent's generation (grandparent's generation for some of you) enjoyed. We're all in this downward spiral. Labor, regardless of how skilled it is, is a commodity.
I have a very pessimistic view o
Nice name.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, at least you have a good username for your spiel.
I don't think it's quite as bad as you think. Frankly, I'm surprised that we've stayed up as high as we have, and some turning points have happened faster than I thought.
Basically, the Indians and Chinese are coming up far faster than we're coming down. It doesn't help us that we're outnumbered about 2 to 1 (Including Europe, Canada, and Australia along with the USA). It also doesn't help that we're looking at the generation that gained the maximum b
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt very much twenty years is enough to bring the median income in India to $30k+.
You'd be surprised, I think. Part of it is that it doesn't have to actually reach median, just reach enough to make outsourcing there uneconomic, on average. You'll always have some back and forth, and that's not a bad thing.
I suspect will return to India with there retirements, spawning industry in India to support their needs.
Putting more demands on the Indian labor pool.
It's creating a self-feeding cycle that I see r
Re: (Score:2)
India's economy is nearing recession
While we're arguably in a recession right now. Part of the reason for the slowing of the growth in India is the cost of oil, which is making everything more expensive.
Another part is that expenses in India have hit a point where it's no longer worth the expense to outsource many things there. Without the constant addition of jobs and such from the USA and other countries, growth will slow.
Re: (Score:2)
Bzzt. Epic fail on your premise.
Re: (Score:2)
antispam wetware (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the next logical step is for someone to start an industry based on organizing cheap labor to combat the spam that gets around our automated anti-spam measures. Fight fire with fire.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, if it's come to this - I'd like a web-of-trust based reputation system. Take a look at the freenet project [freenetproject.org], they got some very promising ideas.
Re:antispam wetware (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of us are already doing this. I employ an India-based 'personal assistant' to do a lot of the pointless tasks I don't want to waste my time with.
This costs me $45 U.S. a month for about 15 hours work. One of the tasks she does for me is log into my email account a few times a day and delete and spam. Simple, really.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for mentioning that because it is exactly the kind of service that I had in mind when I wrote my original comment. I'm just wondering where it will lead in another year or two as those 'personal assistant' businesses scale up and amalgamate in the same way that these nuisance businesses have been.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There are plenty of anti-spam systems that aggregate 'This is spam' clicks from their users (I'm pretty sure that Google and Yahoo! do, I think there are systems that are more explicit about it).
The only payout is in supposedly lower spam->inbox rates though.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely. I use gmail to filter my email for that very reason. However there is always still some spam that gets through and maybe adding some cheap intelligent labour to the system will get those false positives even closer to zero.
Captchas need to evolve (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of asking people to type in badly form text how about answering a question only an English speaker could. Like what is the forth word from the beginning of this sentence?
Re: (Score:2)
I've also seen a prediction that in some small number of years (like 10), China will become the world's largest English-speaking nation.
Re:Captchas need to evolve (Score:5, Funny)
Most brilliant ironic troll message...ever.
Parent
Best way to combat spam is to combat botnets (Score:5, Insightful)
The main reason spammers can keep doing what they do without consequences is that they are hard to track as they exploit users with insecure systems. You can't punish the companies that are advertised, because it would make it very easy for a competitor to get his rival in trouble by sending spam in the victim's name. You can't punish the users who have their machiens compromised and used tos end spam because you would hit a sizeable fraction of the population, virtually all of which simply did not know how to protect themselves.
No, there's only two places to adress the problem:
Firstly the ISPs could use traffic analysis to determine which of their users are infected and allert them about the problem. The problem with this aproach is that such systems could likely be abused to spy on the clients, so some strict regulation woudl be necessary.
Secondly you could start to actually penalise the main company responsible for having put millions and millions of extremely vulnerable systems into the wild. No, it's not just the fault of stupid users. Yes you would still get some infections because users are stupid, but it would likely be an order of magnitude fewer if it was not for Microsoft's downright pathetic security record. I know they made a bad attempt to adress it with UAC in Vista, but quite frankly they messed it up so bad that large number of users simply turn it off ( the fact they felt the need for a GUI setting that turns it off system wide says a lot about how messed up it is ). I'm not saying we should bitchslap every single software vendor that has security vulnerabilities in its code ( it is impractical for obvious reasons ) but when a company with the resoruces Microsoft has more or less ignores the problem for several years, and then makes a half arsed attempt at fixing it, then a charge of damage caused through gross negligence would not be out of line.
Pointers? (Score:5, Funny)
Turn it to advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
If used to digitize books (Score:3, Interesting)
At 2.00 for a thousand capatas, they could probably scan and convert books at a pretty fast pace, too.
An army of people typing in a page at a time could probably turn out a complete book in less than an hour.
Lots of legal and illegal uses for that.
transporter_ii
It can be solved automatically and for free (Score:2, Interesting)
There are some open source or free captcha breakers out there already:
http://churchturing.org/captcha-dist/
http://network-security-research.blogspot.com/2008/01/yahoo-captcha-is-broken.html
etc.
Captcha is broken, captcha is dead. Stop pretending that half-measures will secure anything. It isn't real security and it never was.
Interesting . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
As 1 person can do 800 captcha entry per hour . . . .
Interestingly, that's also about the rate established by Ben Franklin for a manual postal worker to sort mail.
Is this all true (Score:2, Interesting)
Are we sure any of this is really true? I can imagine that MS might find itself to slow to respond, but other players could. My guess is that these are classic "work at home" scams, where the victim is the hopefull worker, who sends money for a "kit" to start work, and then never gets any work to do. The claims about size and workload are merely details meant to add verisimilitude to an otherwise implausible story.
Re:If you had to choose (Score:4, Funny)
I saw a crack site once where the CAPTCHA you had to fill out to download the file had a myspace watermark. I believe it would be crackstorage.
Parent
Re:CAPTCHA Farming (Score:4, Interesting)
I was rather thinking along the same lines, but with a little more extremism.
We've all heard the "thousand monkeys with typewriters" thing. Well, they actually HAVE a thousand monkeys with typewriters and they are using them. (And before anyone gets all cross-ways about my use of the term monkeys, to know me knows I use the term affectionately and I consider myself to be a monkey as well.) The fact of the matter is, there is such a tremendous disparity between standards of living between out "first world" and their "third world" that is was a matter of time before someone decided to tape the potential between the two. (The means by which we extract energy from everything is by exploiting the difference potential between two points whether that may be a difference in temperature or a difference in ionic charge or a difference in air density.) In this case, it's the difference in economic levels that is being exploited and it's a very dangerous and damaging path that is being taken. Consider what happens you have two vessels of liquid and a hose. A siphon can be created to exploit the difference in water levels. And while this could be made to boost the level in the more empty container, the more full container will forever lose its potential and value as nothing could, in turn, be used to re-fill its container -- the flow is exclusively one-way.
Now one might suggest that we simply shift to more advanced economies. We said that long ago when farmers were complaining... we said that when manufacturing workers were complaining... we say that today while information workers are complaining. The trouble is, once IP and information is fully exploited, what will be left to move on to? I'd say we just ran out of markets to be dominant in. And this is NOT new. This is exactly how the Roman and British empires fell.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's for added realism to the game.