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

[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).

Interesting.

[jcuervo]

The going rate is $1k. For a simple /usr/share/dict/words attack on some random account on some random site, it'd cost you about $100.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.

Re:Temporary problem...

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

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 happening.

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.

Re:antispam wetware

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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:CAPTCHA Farming

[erroneus]

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.

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/ and http://xkcd.com/135/