

$1.39 for 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs - marcog1
http://www.deathbycaptcha.com/

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antimatter15
An interesting idea would be a browser extension which users can pay or
subscribe a nominal fee (eg $2 a year) which hooks up to this service so the
user would never need to manually enter a captcha.

It would detect a captcha on a page the moment the browser renders the field
and it would be completed in ~15 seconds by the time the user scrolls down to
the form and completes the other parts.

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thirdusername
Funny you should say that.. We (my former classmate and I) built a prototype
for that a year ago, but life happened and I never got around to making it
into a product. If anyone entrepreneurial is interested in solving that
problem (especially for blind people!), I'd love to make it happen. :)

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vaksel
stuff like this is exactly why captchas are outdated...they don't stop the
real spammers, and just annoy your users.

With most captchas I have to try 3-4 times before I can actually spell out
what the image is showing. The only exception is ReCaptcha, those tend to be
easy to decipher.

I wonder if 3-4 years down the line, everyone will continue using
captchas...even when they stop working as a method to fight spam

~~~
eli
Only if you define "work" as blocking 100% of spam.

The evidence that they work is right in front of you. The incremental cost of
posting 1000 spam comments went from basically zero to $1.39.

I use ReCaptcha on my sites and, as far as I can tell, the only spam getting
through is humans (typically with .cn hostnames) manually entering the
CAPTCHA. Meanwhile it's blocking 100s of dumb, automated attempts.

~~~
fleitz
It depends on what you are doing it for, if you've found site(s) that don't
use rel=nofollow $1.39 for 1000 users is a pretty good deal, especially if the
CAPTCHA is stopping the vast majority of spammers from making the link juice
worthless.

I'd pay $1.39 for 1000 links from sites that haven't been spammed to death
with out thinking about it.

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Urgo
Okay, so bad guys can bypass captchas really easily now for pretty cheap.
Anyone want to make a GM script or something so normal people can use this as
well to answer youtube and other captchas? I'd pay $1.39 to not have to type
captchas in for a month or so of just normal internet use. I'm not trying to
spam, just communicate.. Death TO captchas.

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shubber
The obvious next step is to use comments as CAPTCHAs: "which of these 3
comments is spam?" Then, use the CAPTHCA-breaker that results to filter spam.

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ElbertF
That could actually work if you did it the reCAPTCHA way, i.e. "which two of
these three comments are spam?" Where one of the three is already known to be
spam. Of course the chance of getting it right by guessing is pretty high but
there may be ways around that (by showing more confirmed non-spam comments
perhaps). A cool start-up idea right there!

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kennethologist
This is a great service. Haven't used it on a large scale but for a few small
projects worked very well.

~~~
Zakuzaa
Spamming projects?

~~~
kennethologist
Nopes. But I used service for automating data scraping.

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daimyoyo
I wonder what the rate of return on something like this is. I don't know about
anyone else, but I NEVER click on, yet alone but from people spamming links in
comment threads. Do you?

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rebelde
From Cyprus, I see.

Does this service break any EU directives or "laws"? There should be a law for
that (even if similar services pop up elsewhere in the world).

~~~
tdfx
To prevent what? Data entry? I've also noticed that quite a few shady
companies I've seen register their companies and bank accounts in Cyprus and
live/operate elsewhere. I'm assuming it provides some kind of legal benefit
but I don't know what.

edit: note about Cyprus

~~~
rebelde
I bet you're right. They probably operate elsewhere and use Cyprus for
whatever reason.

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guelo
The difference between a real user and these type of services is mainly the
latency, an effective counter would rely on this fact. One idea would be some
kind of game that would be easy for users with low latency to play for a few
seconds and win but would be impossible for the proxy'd filipinos.

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ck2
Let's see them solve the "pick out the cats" (from dogs) captcha.

Or simple math problems at random.

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ddemchuk
I've burned through thousands of credits at deathbycaptcha on some "darker"
projects of mine, they have a nice service. Depending on the kinds of links
you're building, they can be extremely cost effective. If you're going for
high volume crappy links, they aren't worth it.

here's a good ruby library for using this service:
<http://rubygems.org/gems/deathbycaptcha>

~~~
pavel_lishin
Can you give an example of some of the "darker" projects?

~~~
edcrfv
Automated forum account creation/posting, blog comment spamming, craigslist
account creation/posting to name a few.

Some other famous sites that are doing this since the mid 2000s -
<http://decaptcher.com>

They integrate with just about every famous spam tool.

UPDATE: Automated Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail account creation, etc. They create
accounts in bulk and then spam through the gmail, yahoo, and hotmail accounts
by tools that are being sold.

~~~
ddemchuk
forum spamming is far too expensive if you're paying for captchas. There is an
extremely famous/popular forum spamming software on the market (made by
russians) that internally solves captchas.

If you're going to forum profile spam, you'll go broke paying for captchas.

~~~
edcrfv
Ok I stand corrected, the economics of paying for forum spamming does not make
sense and the software you mentioned (I don't want to name it here) does solve
many captchas automatically (It is even rumored to solve Google's captchas)

But for other stuff that I mentioned in my previous comment, it does make
sense for them economically and they do use it.

~~~
pdenya
I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to provide names or links here. I'm sure if
HN users want to spam we're resourceful enough to figure it out for ourselves
and for those of us who don't care to spam it would be helpful to see what
we're up against.

~~~
edcrfv
Yes I did mean that. I didn't mean to insult the intelligence of HNers though.
Just thought it wouldn't be prudent to mention here!

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julesbravo
This is despicable. People have CATCHAs to keep you idiots out, can't you
respect this?

~~~
daeken
We probably shouldn't talk about viruses or security flaws, either -- might
give someone the idea that it's ok to break into a machine. We ought to
respect it by not discussing such things.

~~~
blocke
"We probably shouldn't talk about viruses or security flaws, either -- might
give someone the idea that it's ok to break into a machine. We ought to
respect it by not discussing such things."

I interpreted the OP to be more disgusted at someone making a business out of
actively circumventing a control then we discussing that it exists.

That is a bit different than discussing the existence of flaws. In this case
it's making money off actively exploiting the flaws.

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plainOldText
Wow. These guys even know customer support. They are here to help you spam
other people.

Taken from their website:

Contact We’re here to help you! Please send us a message to any of the emails
below: Technical Support Payment Support System Admin

