Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Solving CAPTCHAs

A Slashdost post indicated that humans are ready to solve CAPTCHAs for a very low price.

Somebody asked for a quote to solve CAPTCHAs in a 50 hour week on a freelancer recruitment website.
The average asking price to solve CAPTCHAs in 50 hours was 57$, which makes it almost a dollar for an hour. The least asking quote was 30$ (0.6$ for an hour).

The description for this job type is really vague. The number of CAPTCHAs to be solved is not specified. What is specified is the number of hours for which the human will have to work on solving the CAPTCHAs. I would expect a spammer to rather tell the number of CAPTCHAs that need to be solved.

Also there is somehow an implicit assumption that the CAPTCHAs are from a database or are generated by the software. It could very well be that they are relayed to the software application, in which case, the concept of 'finished the job' would not exist. The person who won the bid would have to be available for 50 hours, during which there could be high activity to no activity.

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