How much is the work that http://recaptcha.net/ is doing worth? Not only would it keep some of these people busy breaking useful captchas but we could get some good books digitized out of it. $1.25/1000 ? You could get a book digitized for $100 easy.
Nobody can beat a Mechanical Turk. They are smarter than machines and cheaper than one. So i think when designing next generation security, other than bots, even low-wage workers will be taken into consideration.
Indians never fail to stop impressing me. This is an awesome hack available to the email spammers.
They can create millions of fake accounts(email for e.g.) per months and pass them over to the spammers that spam via their huge botnets(millions of infected windows machines).
This can be a lucrative business in the 3rd world countries.
