I read this amazing post over on ZDNet that details the massive operations out of India providing contract CAPTCHA solving services.
It seems the contractors pull down hundreds of thousands of CAPTCHAs automatically from the likes of Craigslist, Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook, charging around $2 per 1000 solved CAPTCHAs.
Call me naive but it would be so nice if we had a perfect interweb where I didn’t have to spend collective hours typing CAPTCHAs to register on websites, where Indian contractors didn’t offer to break them and where dodgy Eastern European phishing operators didn’t then use those CAPTCHAs to make everyone’s lives less pleasant.
Yeah yeah – naivete I know…
The post came to the conclusion that text based CAPTCHAs are on their deathbed. I guess that means they’ll be replaced by something similarly annoying, that the underworld will crack in five minutes. There has to be a better way.
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
The other way is they know who you are.