Tuesday, September 02, 2008

India's underground CAPTCHA-breaking economy

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/378950042/indias-underground-c.html

ZDNet's Dancho Danchev has a nice little investigative piece about the underground economy in cheapo Indian data-centers that break CAPTCHAs for spammers all day long:
Data processing as a mentality is visible in all the applications a human CAPTCHA solver is using. Basically, there's no indication which service's authentication model they're currently abusing, CAPTCHA breaking is replaced with CAPTCHA solving making it look like it's a some sort of a challenge that they have to solve.

Recruitment of the people that would be later tested for whether on not they quality for the job by exposing them to CAPTCHAs from different services, and a timer running in the background, is mainly done through advertisements like the following :

* easy work
* no learning needed
* no investment needed
* weekly payout
* work from home
* work when you want
* flexible working hours
* highest rates in the industry

Inside India's CAPTCHA solving economy (via /.)