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."
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: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].
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.
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
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.
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.
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 of the future of this planet and I fear for you young folks who are just starting out.
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 Yahoos and Googles of tomorrow will offer free email accounts but limit traffic to so many outbound messages or outbound megabytes a day until the user turns over a credit card or notarized copy of his proof of identity and proof of address.
Re:Proof that (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.