Spammers Paying Others to Solve Captchas

nytimes.com

9 points·rooshdi··7 comments

This has been going on for years... not sure how this is news. Any site that is big enough to be targeted by spammers has (or certainly should have) learned that CAPTCHAs are just one of multiple layers of security that are necessary to prevent abuse of their service.

Back in 2004, someone pointed out to me a nice way of getting free CAPTCHA solvers by offering certain audiovisual materials to visitors and requiring the visitors to solve CAPTCHAs in order to access those materials. To maximize effectiveness, said audiovisual materials tended to "appeal to the prurient interest," to put it politely.

I didn't bother to read the actual article, just responding to the headline: Did you ever look at getafreelancer.com? There are tons of jobs for captcha solving. Permanently.

Is recaptcha safe?

I don't see how it's any different than regular Captchas.

reCaptcha is more than captcha since the user is reconfiguring the misconstrued word taken from a real source. If I remember correctly, the words are from old versions of New York Times and they are put through computer programs to make them hard to decode with computers.

In essence the spammers are really being helpful more than they know!

Yes, but this makes reCaptcha no more secure than other captchas - just more tangentially useful.

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