Not the kind we would like! but what the heck.....
April 25, 2010
Spammers Pay Others to Answer Security Tests
By VIKAS BAJAJ
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/technology/26captcha.html?pagewanted=print
MUMBAI,
Sophisticated spammers are paying people in
The going rate for the work ranges from 80 cents to $1.20 for each 1,000 deciphered boxes, according to online exchanges like Freelancer.com, where dozens of such projects are bid on every week.
Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was a pioneer in devising captchas, estimates that thousands of people in developing countries, primarily in
"There are a few sites that are coordinated," he said. "They create the awareness. Their friends tell their friends, who tell their friends."
Sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end deciphering convoluted characters and typing them into a box is monotonous work. And the pay is not great when compared to more traditional data-entry jobs.
Still, it appears to be attractive enough to lure young people in developing countries where even 50 cents an hour is considered a decent wage. Unskilled male farm workers earn about $2 a day in many parts of
Ariful Islam Shaon, a 20-year-old college student in
He said the students typically work two and a half to three hours a day from their homes and make at least $6 every 15 days; they earn more the faster and the more accurate they are. It is not a lot of money, he acknowledged, but it requires little effort and can help supplement their pocket money.
Mr. Shaon, who agreed to speak to a reporter only over an Internet chat, said he gets the work on Web sites and is paid through Internet money transfer services.
He does not know the identities of the people paying him, nor does he have any interest in finding out. If he asks them, he said, "they maybe do not give me my payments."
Another operator in
It was not possible to verify the claims made by Workcaptcha and Mr. Shaon, but Mr. von Ahn said it was clear that
Executives at Internet companies like Google say they do not worry a lot about people being paid to decode captchas because they are one of several tools that Web sites use to secure themselves. Some sites, for instance, might also send confirmation codes as text messages to cellphones, which then have to be entered into a separate verification page before new e-mail accounts are activated.
"It can't be helped that paid human solvers will be able to solve captchas," said Macduff Hughes, an engineering director at Google. "Our goal is to make mass account creation less attractive to spammers, and the fact that spammers have to pay people to solve captchas proves that the tool is working."
Mr. von Ahn said that the cost of hiring people, even as cheap as it may appear, should limit the extent of such operations to only spammers who have figured out ways to make money. "It's only the people who really actually are already profitable that can do this," he said.
That view was confirmed by an executive at one south Indian outsourcing company that advertises its captcha-solving prowess on a Web site. The executive, Dileep Paveri, said his firm had stopped offering the service because it was not very profitable.
His company, SBL, which is based in
"We found that it's not worth doing," said Mr. Paveri, a manager in SBL's business process outsourcing and graphics unit. Moreover, he added, "after some time, the productivity of people comes down because it's a monotonous job. They lose their interest."
__._,_.___