Privacy Digest

Inside India’s CAPTCHA solving economy - Via ZDNet.com:

No CAPTCHA can survive a human that’s receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-wagedhuman CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of “data processing” while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHA’s, I’m already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India’s major CAPTCHA solving companies. The consolidation logically leading to increased bargaining power, is resulting in an international franchising model recruiting data processing workers empowered with do-it-yourself CAPTCHA syndication web based kits, API keys, and thousands of proxies to make their work easier, and the process more efficient.

Let’s analyze the shady data processing economy of India, discuss exclusive photos of Indian workers breaking MySpace and Google CAPTCHAs, and take a tour inside the web applications of several Bangladesh based franchises, whose team of almost 1,000 international workers is actively soliciting deals for breaking Craigslist, Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook’s CAPTCHA, promising to deliver 250k solved CAPTCHAs per day on a “$2 for a 1000 solved CAPTCHAs” rate.

One of the services in question is the India based decaptcher.com, which will allow you to retrieve its API once you putmoney in their PayPal account :

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The service is among the countless number of franchises operated by several of India’s large data processing companies,making it harder, but not necessarily impossible to establish connection between them. At the beginning, mom and pop CAPTCHA services seeking to expand start participating in the franchise business model offered by the big companies that are no longer capable of executing the projects on their own, and so in a win-win-win situation for the big company, the franchise, and the customers, India’s CAPTCHA solving economy is booming.

Moreover, the investments made in purchasing the PCs, the web proxies, the training and education of the staff by providing them with tips for increasing their CAPTCHA solving productivity, as well as the sophistication of the web based applications aiming to empower non-technical users, clearly explain why India remains the market leader in CAPTCHA solving, with thousands of legitimate data processing workers converted to CAPTCHA solvers.

From a legal perspective, the creativity of the marketers behind these services is simply amazing. Here come the sociallyoriented ” CAPTCHA solving service aiming to serve the visually impaired, the fake academic looking for technical know-how in breaking Gmail’s CAPTCHA for his research project, to the companies interested in helping you increase your business efficiency by allowing you to automatically abuse a particular service and reach more potential customers.

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.

(Read Original Article - Via ZDNet.com .)