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Why Paying People to Crack CAPTCHAs Might Be Good
Posted January 23, 2007 – 10:03 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in Spam and EmailAlmost four years ago I posted about a spammer that was using a free porn site as a way to get people to solve CAPTCHAs (those annoying images that ask you to type in stuff). Two Slashdot stories from a few months back discuss how spammers might be hiring people in developing countries to solve them. The going rate seems to be about $0.60/hour.
Now unlike most, I think this may turn out to be a good thing. Why? Because it imposes some cost on the spammers. Unfortunatly, the cost isn’t high enough, but nevertheless it is something. However, in some ways it is similar to e-postage which as my collegue, John R. Levine, addressed does not solve spam. Instead what may be the final solution to spam is increased cooperation among ISPs, along the lines of what Carl Hutzler wrote a while back.
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