Inside India's CAPTCHA Solving Economy

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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antispam wetware

[Horar]

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.

So let me get this straight...

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

...you're going to reduce the human population by cloning the U.S. military's Reporting and Planning Terminal [army.mil]?

Re:If you had to choose

[Samantha Wright]

Heavens, no! At Slashdot, CAPTCHA-breakers are used for less lucrative motives than elsewhere. The posts are, in fact, originating from PROFESSIONAL CAPCHA ENTRY OPEATORS AND WE CAN DO EVEN 25000 ENTRIES PER DAY AS MY COMPANY IS A 25 SEATER FIRM SPEALISED IN DATA ENTRY.

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.

Pointers?

[Luthair]

I wonder if they have any pointers, I fail at CAPTCHAs all the time.

Re:Captchas need to evolve

[caffeinemessiah]

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?

Most brilliant ironic troll message...ever.

Obligatory xkcd

[The Qube]

http://xkcd.com/87/ [xkcd.com] and http://xkcd.com/135/ [xkcd.com]

Re:Captchas need to evolve

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

That would probably eliminate 80% of Americans.

Re:Proof that

[billcopc]

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:Captchas need to evolve

[Anonymous Coward]

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.