But guess what, this is an actual industry. Here is an article that shows, to my great amazement, that people have not only taken this concept to heart to solve the real problem (for spammers and hackers) of automated CAPTCHA decoding by low-wage humans, but they’ve even managed to load-balance the whole thing to reduce latency! What … the hell!

We have several big teams and hundreds of active agents solving captchas, all at one time, especially during daytime in India. The backend of this project involves over 45 powerful, expensive servers communicating with the MySpace site to pull the captchas and then queue them up on this site, and then process the results to push back to MySpace all within 20 seconds per captcha.
…
Sometimes 100 or more agents are waiting at the same time.

Now I’m going to be open-minded here… That’s some entrepreneurial spirit. The reason why 10 years ago I thought this would be a joke was because I didn’t think anybody would put up with this kind of work. Not only was I wrong but now that I think about it, I can’t see how it’s worse than factory work or other kinds of manual labor. In fact, isn’t it better?

Let’s generalize this a little in the way I’ve mentioned in the opening and see if it can’t be applied innovatively on a large scale to other projects. This world needs more jobs.

http://hotcaptcha.com/