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."

Comments

Proof that

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Proof that

[Anonymous Coward]

best way to stop spam is by educating the recipient that it is bad to buy from a spammer.

Re:Proof that

[Jimmy_B]

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).

This was quite predictable

[rumith]

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...

[Firethorn]

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.

Best way to combat spam is to combat botnets

[BlueParrot]

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.

Turn it to advantage

[Spacejock]

If every site took up that reCaptcha thing all these paid captcha-solvers would be helping to digitise thousands upon thousands of old books ... on the spammers' dime.

Re:More Evidence for me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nice name..

[Firethorn]

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 benefit from outsourcing - cheap goods while still having relatively high incomes.

So yeah, I figure it's going to be a while before those of us in the USA and rest of Europe see a rise in standard of living other than through sheer technological progress. Buying a second home might not be as feasable to much of the population any more, but on the other hand we have much more effective medical(if expensive), cell phones, faster computers, bigger TVs, etc...