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.
The other way is they know who you are.