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Comment by iigs | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time to beat the captcha-cracking guys at their own game: use mechanical turk to "interview" people signing up for a new email account.

If you signed up via an IM session rather than a web form it would leave a lot more context in the communication, which might be useful for making a determination. You could also give the Turker additional money for an account that hasn't been flagged for spam in 30 days.

I don't know if this idea has any merit at all, but it seems like a natural response to the arms race at hand.

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So two turkers will end up talking to each other during signups?

I would rather a technical solution .

Would charging $5 a month for an e-mail account work for you?

Credit card validation for an account (charge $0.00 just to confirm the information?)

You'd actually submit an authorization for $1.00. An auth doesn't withdraw funds, it only allocates them, and it expires after a few days.

I think that'd be useful as a means of creating a universal web id, which could then be used in lots of areas.

I think the CC providers charge merchants for these. Do you know that to be incorrect? If I'm correct this means that it now costs email providers cents per account per month, which just took an expensive turn for the worse.

If it doesn't work that way I bet Visa amends their merchant agreement to start charging -- they aren't in the business of doing millions of identity verifications per month for free.

Oh, you definitely pay for the privilege of submitting Auth requests. You have to have a merchant account with the card issuer. The systems I've worked with went through a third-party gateway system which connects out to all the different card issuers. It's definitely not cheap to set up. I'm not sure if there's a per-request charge or not. I wouldn't be surprised either way.

Yeah because CC accounts are so hard to come by, esp for criminals.

I think there would actually have to be some money changing hands. Five dollars would be enough to throw out the spammers and still be a small enough amount to keep customers happy. This is assuming that their e-mail is extremely important to them.

I'm thinking Google and Microsoft can't do this. Perhaps there is a niche opportunity here?

No email provider who wants to be dominant is going to raise that kind of barrier to use.

I swear, the first program to pass the turing test will have been programmed to break captchas.

Now there's a way to bring about the Singularity.

Yes, matching distorted shapes w/ noise attached to a set of 26 to 62 unique shapes will bring self-aware AI.

With the history of unusual ways things have been discovered in science, I'm not sure if that is sarcasm.

Given the financial aspect I'd prefer a technical solution as well, just as the spammers surely must wish they could solve captcha computationally. Unfortunately they're willing to pay per account and unless their opponents (the major email providers) are also willing to, they have a significant advantage.

I liked the early days of gmail where an invite was required - an invites were really hard to come by. Invite-only could be another barrier if you don't give new accounts the ability to invite for some weeks, and trickle in the invites.

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