Spammers Use The Human Touch To Avoid CAPTCHA
by NPR STAFF October 17, 2010
Try to buy some concert tickets or create a new e-mail account, and you're usually confronted with a puzzle of sorts.
A box appears with a distorted word - that sometimes isn't even a word - and you have to re-type it. If you tilt your head or squint your eyes, you can usually just make it out.
That's the point, of course. The puzzles are called CAPTCHAs, and a human can decipher them but a computer can't. It's a way to thwart bad guys from, say, creating hundreds of fake e-mail addresses to spam you from. Or buying up all the tickets to that concert you want to see. But the spammers have found a low-cost, low-tech way around the device - human beings.
Spammers and mass-ticket purchasers have outsourced CAPTCHA solving to teams of low-wage workers in places like Russia and Southeast Asia. Many of them don't even speak English. They don't have to, according to Stefan Savage.
...
Not to put too fine a point in it, but -
I TOLD YOU SO!
*THIS* is what "One laptop per child" leads to: the electronic version of wetback labor. Cheap, disposable, inexhaustible supplies of froggy litttle native children waiting to do the bidding of the Great White Hunter who gives away free candy, free firearms, and free computers.There is, of course, a catch: the dentist isn't free, the ammunition isn't free, and the network isn't free. Nothing, in the final analysis, is free when the Great White Hunter tosses it off the back of the coffee truck.
Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The Internet is, to the poor people of the third world, a Sorcerer's Apprentice which will turn into yet another vehicle destined to run over their hopes for a better future.
Bill Horne Moderator