Hulleye Comes By!

the art of sand castling. it rocks. people create the most awesome creations given the right tools and opportunity and time. clickety for more.

You may have read recently about the latest way you’re helping librarians around the world scan their archives into digital format, by solving their CAPTCHA’s.

well seems like there’s another easy buck to be made from CAPTCHA’s.

CAPTCHA’s are those little boxes you see asking you to type the letters in the image so they can verify you are human. This is to prevent programmers to write programs to automatically sign up for a million gmail addresses and use it for sending spam or storing data (6GB per account) without arousing any suspicion. CAPTCHA images keep getting smarter as do they programs written to break them but now all that might change.

Indians have started employing cheap labour who sit at the computer and break these all day long as a service to other companies (who post 1000s of ads on craigslist, send spam through gmail, do link farming etc). The Indian companies charge $2 per 1000 and claim to be able to break about 800 per hour or over 6000 per 8-hour day. That earns them $12 per day or ~15K indian rupees (27K PKR). That’s more than most people can get with a degree. This is an emerging industry. You can work from home for however long and whenever u want. A lot of data entry firms are branching in because of the no qualifications criteria. Bangladesh is getting in on it too. 27K PKR per month for typing letters in an image…