2008 hasn't been the best year for CAPTCHA-based anti-spam systems; Google's Gmail CAPTCHA was broken in February, followed by that of Hotmail in April. Researchers have fought back by incorporating images into CAPTCHAs, but this is only effective against bot-driven CAPTCHA crackers, and while automated attackers may be responsible for a majority of the CAPTCHA-breaking attempts that occur every day, they no longer account for the entirety. Dancho Danchev, writing for ZDNet, reports on the emergence of CAPTCHA-breaking as an economic model in India. He reports that it's impossible to untangle the corporate web that's unfurled, given that large CAPTCHA-breaking companies often farm work out to multiple smaller businesses, but all available information suggests that CAPTCHA-cracking (referred to as "solving" in marketing parlance) is a booming sector of the Indian tech economy. Danchev reports that CAPTCHA-crackers can earn more per day than they can as legitimate data processing centers. Indian CAPTCHA-crackers (perhaps they were Chinese gold farmers in another life) appear to earn between 1/10 and 1/8 of a cent per CAPTCHA solved. The businesses in question advertise a wide range of available CAPTCHAs per day; smaller outfits claim they can provide 25,000-50,000 solutions per day, while large-scale operations advertise themselves as producing up to 700,000 CAPTCHAs in a single day. These cracking systems are also designed to minimize lag; one company states it can return CAPTCHAs from MySpace within 20 seconds, though they rather humorously note: "We run into many slowdowns. The most common bottleneck is that MySpace itself is often bogged down, slow and error prone, which then makes it very difficult for our servers to pull captchas quickly." One can't help wondering if heavy traffic from India is one reason why MySpace is boggy, lethargic, and "error-prone." CAPTCHAs may not be dead, at least not yet, but the corporatization of breaking spells serious trouble for any company that relies on CAPTCHAs to foil spammers. They were nice while they lasted (if occasionally impossible to read), but it's hard to see how researchers will find a CAPTCHA that legitimate customers can read that remains illegible to humans paid to solve them.

By Joel Hruska 0

Does the GOP VP nominee possess hidden computer skills? Can she possibly bring the White House into the 21st century, technologically at least? Cringely has a few thoughts.

As we've learned over the last few days, the presumptive GOP candidate for vice president is many things: a reformist governor, a hunter, an ex-beauty queen, a mother of five, a physical fitness nut, and a lover of caribou burgers. But is she a hacker?

According to the Anchorage Daily News she is. In a front page story from September 2004, the ADN describes Palin thusly:

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator.....Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich's computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.

In the great north, where political corruption vies with oil and gas for the state's primary export, it seems Palin was asked to rummage around former state GOP leader Ruedrich's hard drive.

... The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician "said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff," Palin said in an interview. "I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was there."

Palin found dozens of e-mail messages and documents stacked up in trash folders, many showing work Ruedrich had been doing for the Republican Party and others showing how closely he worked with at least one company he was supposed to be regulating.

Obviously they don't see a lot of hackers up in polar bear country, because it doesn't look like Palin did more than some basic electronic dumpster diving in Ruedrich's trash can. But it is reassuring to note that at least someone on the Elephant ticket knows something about computers, after McCain's admission to complete and utter ignorance of all things digital [video].

We don't yet know what Obama's geek cred is. But I'll bet $50 he's a Mac and not a PC.

Meanwhile, another kerfuffle has arisen over Palin's Wikipedia entry, which got edited over a thousand times since last week, starting just before she got the surprise nod from Daddy Mc. At least one of the editors admits to being a McCain volunteer, but it's been a free-for-all ever since with both sides weighing in heavily. The page is now "semi-protected," which in Wikpedia-speak means you can't edit it anonymously. 

A key point of contention: ongoing ethics investigations of Palin herself, which some predict could bring her historic candidacy to a rapid Thomas Eagleton-like demise. And if it does, I have three words of advice to the McCain camp: Draft Paris Hilton. She's tanned, she's rested, she's ready, and she could teach his campaign a thing or two about manipulating the Internet for fame and fortune.

Notes from the Field | Robert X. Cringely 0

CANBERRA, (Reuters) - A Chinese factory worker has become an Internet sensation after a picture of her smiling and flashing a peace sign to a co-worker testing an Apple iPhone stayed on the phone that was sold to a man in Britain. Photos of the unidentified, smiling woman were posted on the Apple discussion website MacRumours.com by a customer identified as "markm49uk" from Kingston-upon-Hull and quickly posted around other sites. "Not sure if this is or is not the 'norm' but I just received my brand new iPhone here in the UK and once it had been activated on iTunes I found that the home screen (the screen you can personalize with a photo) already had a photo set against it!!!!" he wrote. "It would appear that someone on the production line was having a bit of fun - has anyone else found this?" Some people voiced concern that the woman could now lose her job while others joked on the website that they were considering returning their phones because they did not come loaded with a photo. "I think its a kind of personal touch. It's nice. Maybe every phone that gets a full quality test should have its tester's picture taken and left on there. And the working conditions look pretty good," wrote one. Taiwanese company Foxconn assembles the iPhones for Apple in Shenzhen in southern China but calls to the company by Reuters went unanswered. However Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun told the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong that the woman had been identified but her details would not be released. She had also been assured by her bosses that her job was safe. Liu said the photos were taken in the testing department as part of a normal procedure and only one phone was known to be affected so far. (Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith, editing by Miral Fahmy) 0