Michael Kaplan wrote:
Opinion: It is practical for spammers to have the CAPTCHA manually
decoded.
Response: Way too expensive, especially since even this email will have to
pass through a spam filter.
Weak. Consider:
Spammers will have CAPTCHAs solved by humans, cost-effectively.
(This is not an opinion, this is a proposition.)
You have failed to, and indeed cannot, disprove this.
For all the pulling of figures out of the air, we simply do not know what a
solution costs, or what it is worth, now, or in the future. That CAPTCHAs
*can* be solved, at some cost, for some value, is almost sufficient to
invalidate the counter-assertion. A solution gives us is some measure of
the chance that there's a human on the other end (that's what CAPTCHAs are
for). It doesn't tell us anything useful about that human (particularly,
what their hourly rate is). Nor do we have a good figure for the value of
the expedited delivery that a solution would obtain.
You may still be right of course, but you haven't disposed of the objection
by proposing the contrary. Come up with (pretty much) indisputable figures
for the (minimum) cost and (maximum) value and you might get there.
Incidentally, it's worth noting that a mechanism that places an unfair
burden on the blind (for instance) is highly undesirable, and probably
illegal in some jurisdictions.
Rgds,
JRK
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