Inside India's CAPTCHA Solving Economy 167
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."
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".
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best way to stop spam is by educating the recipient that it is bad to buy from a spammer.
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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).
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Really? I have yet to receive a single e-mail for MLM products. And I'm an e-mail administrator too, and see the spam trap of multiple people.
The type of spam varies over time, but generally consists of:
- Drugs. Most noticably viagra, cialis and rogaine, but also more mundane drugs.
- Sex-related snake oil.
- Nigerian 419 scams.
- Fake watches, purses and other designer products.
- Portuguese, Korean and Russian spam which I have no idea what is for.
- Indians with job offers. They're not really recruiters,
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Are you sure about that? Sellers who got their stuff through multilevel marketing schemes generally don't disclose that fact. I don't know what percentage of spam can be traced back to MLM (determining that would take some serious investigative work), but I do know that one of the major MLM companies is Herbalife, which (a) sells drugs and (b) doesn't allow its distributors to disclose their relationship. Also, those finders fees you mention are a form of MLM themselves.
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MLMs only sell to people who want the product? HAH!
Tell that to thousands of victims (neighbors, relatives, co-workers) of Amway, Herbalife, Pre-paid legal, etc.
Spam is used by the MLMers as well. If you can push crap to your neighbors you can push crap via spam.
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If you don't think friends of Amway zombies are victims, please do not interact with regular people.
Besides, if you weren't so festering fucking dumb you'd see I said spam can be used on anyone, neighbors or not. Maybe, just maybe, you'd realize that spam is bulk unwanted email, and it counts even if you know the person. But considering that all your post does is pump MLMs, I'd say that you DO know the difference and are trying to cloud it, to make MLMs (and the assholes involved with them) look good. Are t
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No, PPL is a scam because it's an MLM pushed by scammers like you. There's always some shill willing to tell a story about how great PPL is, despite (supposedly) not being affiliated, etc... It's misrepresented, and when you try to deal with PPL management, or marketing (people like you) you get nothing but lies.
If you weren't a scammer you'd look around online and see the horrible reviews PPL gets. Instead you'll just say that everyone complaining has some grudge and dismiss it all.
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So charge a penny to receive e-mail from strangers! When people sign up for a newsletter, after the first e-mail, they add the new address to their whitelist, which automatically sends an e-mail back to the sender to refund the penny. Then watch as spam almost vanishes.
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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.
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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.
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The last example I hear was about a Danish national who was deported to Germany because of his involvement in a "nazi" music label, and that carries a prison term in Germa
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Yes it is.
"Government" by *some* people... is inherently flawed and doomed to fail in the long run.
The reason for this is the conflict of interests between the leader's personal interests and the interests of the people he has to lead.
It only works, as long as there are common interests, as in any relationship.
But because of the basic nature of humanity - whether you deny it or not -, to work for the own propagation*, those that became leaders, did so to gain more resources via power. Which means: Less reso
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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.
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Just to note: My correction of the post correcting you in no way means that I don't disagree with you wholeheartedly.
Seriously: you mean to propose that the current thrust of censorship and control of discourse is coming from the Democrat side of things? I think you'll find that the primary actors in the various "Control your personal life" and "spy on you" initiatives are pretty much all elephants, buddy. Specifics include the propagandizing of the military by fundamentalist Christian doctrine, the Pa
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.
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I just with Gmail would go back to the "Invite only" approach,
The only way that would make a dent in Gmail's growth is if every existing user were booted off. (Which would kinda' kill Gmail.)
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Interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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]?
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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!
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Rapters are fast and intelligent, hunt in packs, and hell.. they can even open doors! Support rapter cloning!
Surely such intelligent rapters would know how to produce more rapters without cloning?
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Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Funny)
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> 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
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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.
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So in other words, the people with the resources to raise children in the best way possible are the ones who aren't having them. I love the human race sometimes.
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.
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].
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There will always be someone at the bottom, but they won't always be willing to work for peanuts.
That there are jobs that are not economic in some areas demonstrates this (because immigration laws limit the labor pool to the local barrel).
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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
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I doubt very much twenty years is enough to bring the median income in India to $30k+. It is bound to happen eventually. Also, many Indian people live in the US currently, and I suspect will return to India with there retirements, spawning industry in India to support their needs. And that may be true for other countries, too.
But back to that matter at hand, maybe this is a sign that CAPTCHA as we know it is on the way out.
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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
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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.
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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
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China and India both have to resist internal pressures to splinter into a collection of smaller states. The break up of the former USSR is an recent example.
It is a seeming improbability that India has not already started to fall apart. Many Indian states are already autonomous, and political reality is that India has has deteriorated into an conglomeration of territories ruled over by "war lord" politicians who owe lit
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These posts assume that India and China will continue to exist in their present form.
Your post assumes that this matters. I'm simply looking at population levels in a general manner, correlated with wage levels and support service availability.
China and India currently have the advantage of low wages combined with acceptable levels of support services(stuff like roads, electricity, etc...)
Whether China fragments into a dozen states or not, it doesn't matter as long as there isn't a huge amount of fighting.
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
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Maybe some can't afford it, but like BitterOldGUy said, wages are going up over there.
And a lot of stuff over there is half the price it would be over here. I think that what I was trying to say is that eventually, while it might not be LCD TVs or highly shippable cell phones, but at some point the company will look at manufacturing costs in China and, for example, the rust belt in the USA and build somewhere in the midwest where labor is available and land inexpensive.
For that matter, there's small but es
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Bzzt. Epic fail on your premise.
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I hate spam as much or more than the next fellow, but am unwilling to advocate "eradication of population" to solve it. And I find it amazing that a post that includes such a suggestion can get a +3 Insightful mod.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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With assistants like that, who needs enemies?
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How ironic, she's probably right next door to the people who created it to begin with.
This reminds me of a company I used to work for. One division created toxic waste and another division was paid by the Federal gov't to clean up that very same waste. It was a great racket while it lasted.
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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
In that case, I hope you're not receiving any information by email worth more than $45/month.
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What kind of information would that then be? A new business idea or something? Because if you are a personal assistant, I don't think you'd be interested in a new business idea.
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His e-mail password, yes.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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So why can't Americans speak English? ;)
Re:Captchas need to evolve (Score:5, Funny)
Most brilliant ironic troll message...ever.
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You didn't interpret this correctly. The sentence he was referring to was, "Tomatoes left on the vine will rot in humid weather." You see, here the forth word is "rot", which means rotate the stack. And forth keywords are English based. Next time don't be so quick to judge.
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It's estimated that 8% of India speaks English [wikipedia.org], which would be 90 million people. That's second only to the United States.
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Well, what do you expect? (Score:1)
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Gold farming is roughly equivalent to producing any sort of shlock media.
Someone is willing to pay for it and pretty much all it takes to produce it is a bit of time.
CAPTCHA Farming (Score:1)
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.
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Nanotech? Genetic engineering?
I don't think so. The Roman empire fell because they pissed off a hired military leader who was able to rally a whole people to war--Attila the Hun. The British empire fell because they relied on labor from their opressive rule over other countries. I won
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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)
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Yesterday I signed up with Google, took me 7 tries before I finally got one right - almost gave up on it.
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.
Change trust model: !accountable/accountable (Score:2, Interesting)
The trust model needs to be changed from "not human"/"human" to "not accountable/accountable."
If you can hold the person accountable for abuse, you can give him more privileges. Knowing who he is so you can bill him or sue him is one way to hold him accountable.
Those who are unable or unwilling to provide either real-life contact information or usable billing information will be stuck with limited services.
Those who live in countries where they cannot be held accountable will be similarly limited.
The Yahoo
Resources (Score:2)
Some three billion people in poverty in the world, each with a mind more powerful than any computer (as proven by this task), looking to make a miniscule amount of money for themselves and their families. And this is the best the market can come up with? Sheesh.
Why is this even legal? (Score:2)
Are there any legitimate reasons to operate or employ a CAPCTHA solving business? The only uses I can think of involve spamming forums or identity theft. Why are these companies allowed to operate? If it were in the U.K., it could very well be in voliation of the Computer Misuse Act - do they not have equivalent legislation over there?
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Would you expect your government to legislate against a business model that brings in a large amount of foreign currency?
There are a number of areas in which they already do. Why legislate against, say, class A drugs, when instead you could regulate and tax them? Presumably they perceive the downsides as being more significant than the potential profits.
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The solution was obvious. (Score:2)
CAPTCHAs were designed to delineate between machine and human, then preclude the machine segment.
Solution? Use humans.
This never occurred to the designers of CAPTCHAs?
Ridiculous for anyone to assume that the time involved was not worth doing it manually, in bulk processing. To assume their time has the same monetary value as that of the rest of the world is pretty narrow-minded, and somewhat arrogant, in my opinion.
Cultural references (Score:2)
Use tests based on American cultural references. Won't fix everything but sure will make it harder for them to use foreign labor.
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.
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Besides, Europeans have assured me that Americans have no culture.