… it will.

We have all see CAPTCHA’s (aka Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). They are images with somewhat garbled text on them that websites used to tell humans from automated programs. The idea is to prevent prevent accounts being created until a user correctly identifies letters in an image – something computers have a hard time doing.

Turns out matters are more complicated than that. Over the past few months people have created software programs that can decode CAPTCHAs (see this story on Ars Technica)

More interesting though is this story about CAPTCHA breaking being outsourced to India! As this ZDNet article shows there is a complete economic model here, and business is booming. According to the author, CAPTCHA-catchers can earn more per day than they can as legitimate data processing centers.

This is just incredible. The creativity of the human mind knows no bounds, and if there is a buck to be made, someone will figure out a way to do it. Read the complete article Inside India’s CAPTCHA solving economy

What a strange world we live in!