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I would agree, if general-purpose captcha-beating software were available. But that isn't so. Each captcha system was beaten by custom code, individually written for that system. So in effect, it is not much different than adding a new font to existing OCR software.

Most of them don't actually beat the captcha with a program. This is how it gets done.

I wrote a piece on Craigslist's Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers last year. They've tried everything known and it hasn't worked. They've tried capchas, email confirmation, phone confirmation, and IP address checking. It hasn't helped. There's a whole industry providing tools to help spam Craigslist.

Craigslist is now leaning hard on some of the companies helping others spam Craigslist, with modest success. At least Craigslist spamming tools are no longer available via Google Checkout. (With that, Google was close to being an active participant in illegal activity.) "www.adsoncraigs.com", the source of Craigslist Auto Poster, has been shut down. Some of the Craigslist posting tools use a program to break captchas, and some outsource the job to a service in a low-wage country.

The going price for oursourced manual captcha solving is around $0.60/1000 captchas.

This is what you do... You start your own consulting business and do freelance work in the evenings and weekends as a side job. You get a couple of books in the language you need/want to know, and you start your own little projects to support your business (like a time tracking app, or a billing application, etc...). So now you have a business, language experience, an application, and business experience under your built while still working your day job. Now you goto freelance websites looking for small jobs and gradually grow to larger ones.

After a year or two of this, you'll have a lot of diverse experience in a wide range of areas that you can legitimately add to your resume.

I say this because this is exactly what I did... and I went from a software engineer to the director of the IT department in 14 months because of my independent work and foundation I made for myself.

Just don't call your company something stupid like Jackhole Studios...

OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?

Because they're not using a computer to break it. They've done what a lot of global operations have done - if you can't easily automate it, move the part that requires expensive humans to a part of the world where humans are rather cheaper.

As someone else has already posted this link:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Web-Promotion-Data-Processing/Gmail-Account-Creation-amp-Forms.html

Google has become a key enabler in spams and scams, because it's so easy to create GMail accounts in bulk. Many sites block email addresses from Hotmail and AOL, because they're mostly either spammers or losers. GMail once had a better reputation, because it was launched as an "exclusive" service. But we're getting close to the point where probably time to start blocking GMail addresses too.

Want to see a GMail scammer in action right now? Read this.

I don't think CAPTCHA's are being machine broken. I've seen ads outsourcing the typing in of CAPTCHA bidding $1 per 1,000. Try looking at http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Entry/Captcha-PROJECT.html to get an idea of what is going on.

hmmm no one mentioned http://www.getafreelancer.com/ but maybe I broke the first law of usenet by mentioning it... Here's one example: http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Flash-Website-Design/Website-Design.223416.html

hmmm no one mentioned http://www.getafreelancer.com/ but maybe I broke the first law of usenet by mentioning it... Here's one example: http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Flash-Website-Design/Website-Design.223416.html

C'mon now. First my girlfriend gets hooked on Tetris and then suckers me into it too, so I play awhile/lot and then I start dreaming the little shapes all night, right? And now I'm solving captchas in my sleep! (profit!!!!)

Does this mean my wetware has been assimilated already?

...Of course this discussion is merely hypothetical.

This, and all other forms of CAPTCHAs, are ultimately vulnerable to some poor bastard in India or Africa or wherever sitting in front of a computer and filling out the form manually for a few cents.

From another post above: http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Proces sing-Data-Entry/Data-Entry-Solve-CAPTCHA.html

Indians are fast, accurate and cheap:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Proces sing-Data-Entry/Data-Entry-Solve-CAPTCHA.html

Of course, there are those who seek to use the IT talent of the sub-continent for a more direct attack:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP-ASP/yah oo-ocr-bypass-captcha.157160.html

And as an upstream poster pointed out, there's always the old "Free Porn - solve this CAPTCHA for access" approach.

Indians are fast, accurate and cheap:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Data-Proces sing-Data-Entry/Data-Entry-Solve-CAPTCHA.html

Of course, there are those who seek to use the IT talent of the sub-continent for a more direct attack:

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP-ASP/yah oo-ocr-bypass-captcha.157160.html

And as an upstream poster pointed out, there's always the old "Free Porn - solve this CAPTCHA for access" approach.

notice the ad to the right of this article (Related Links)?

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP-Website -Design/zendecode-com-seo-top.html

What am I supposed to do for money? I don't want a free ride but odds are that, if I wouldn't hire someone disabled like me, nobody else will either.

My dad always told me to get a profession (lawyer, doctor, etc.), not a job. With a job, say as a manager, you're always dependent on a company being willing to employ you for your income. With a profession, you can work for a company or a firm, or hang out your own shingle and work for yourself. One of the best things about being a skilled developer is that it's more of a profession than a job, and you can hang out your own shingle if a company won't hire you. Sounds like you've got the skills to do so, and now a business degree to help you with the financial/legal/managerial side of running your own business, so why not give it a try?

There are multiple options: contract application development (http://www.dice.com/ http://www.scriptlance.com/ http://www.getafreelancer.com/ http://www.rentacoder.com/ http://www.elance.com/ government & corporate grants for small tech businesses (http://www.technologygrantnews.com/), or various tech-related consulting services (here's one somewhat related to your situation - http://www.adaptivetech.net/).

It's easy to get into the mindset of thinking the only way to make money is by working for a corporation, and to an extent that's probably the most secure way, unless the corporation goes under. But there are other avenues that while initiallly more difficult may give you more control over your own destiny, and hence may prove to be both more secure and more rewarding in the long run. Try to identify a need that your skills and experiences allow you to address in a unique way. For example, your tech skills and long experience, plus MS might allow for some interesting services to people with MS and similar demographics, and would probably be a decent candidate for a government small business grant. Think about it.