Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Choose your own NY adventure–mine is expensive with three kids and swiss boarding school, but I think I forget my wife to be’s fashion needs, hehe!

How many hard drives is enough? I’ve got a hard-disk buying fever; they’re just so cheap:

I have three internal Seagate drives, four external firewire Seagate drives, a WD firewire drive, and two USB drives for a grand total of:

• Internal: 320GB + 500GB + 250GB = 1070GB
• Laptop: 120GB
• External Firewire: 300GB, 300GB, 300GB, 400GB, 500GB = 1800GB
• External USB: 40GB, 200GB = 240GB

This brings me to a grand total of 3230 GB, or 3.2 TB of disk space available to me at any given time. Imagine how troublesome my storage needs would become if I decided to say, use RAID?

Charles Arthur has written a somewhat ridiculous concept article at the Guardian UK, The price of humans who’ll spam blogs is falling to zero. It’s full of completely wrong statements, like:

If the captcha was filled in, it must have been done by a person; if it had been done by a machine, the spammers would have cracked the problem of solving captchas and would be busily spamming every blog they could find.

Actually, cracking captchas has been done reliably and cheaply. I would be comfortable saying that it’s a solved field that a script-kiddy could learn enough about online to write his own captcha-breaking spam bot.

The point of his article revolves around the idea that supplying computers to impoverished nations will result in large-arrays of manual spammers:

Elsewhere this week, deliveries began of the hand-powered laptop, Nicholas Negroponte’s computing gift to the developing world. I’ve no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we’ll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam.

Sorry Charles, but the human spam attack is always more expensive than the machine technique. I can buy a few machines and send out thousands of spam comments a minute–how many humans would you have to pay to do the same, 24/7?

Update: The above could totally be wrong. I’ve just deleted about 50 comments from this article, all offering to manually crack captchas with elite offshore teams:

Sadhan Kumar says on 2/2/2008 at 2:23:
Dear Sir,

I am Sadhan Kumar from Dhaka, Bangladesh. My email id # sadhan.kum@gmail.com. I am ready for working with your program. I have more experienced in this field. You can also see this like for my running work (www.qlinkgroup.com). I can entry captchas about 3000-5000 within 5 hours in a day if your site is fast. So according to your requirment. If work is big quanity then price is $4 per 1000 captchas. I can agree with your Captchas and Program. So, I am waiting for your kind help.
Thanks all

Sadhan Kumar,
Dhaka, Bagladesh

And another motivated fellow:

Balaji says on 2/16/2008 at 7:18 am:
I am Balaji from Tamil Nadu(India). I am having experience in captcha entry. I can type min 70 words per minute. I am having 10 seats with experienced team of people. Kindly give me further details.

Now we get some pricing:

Hasan says on 3/11/2008 at 6:04 am:
Hi i live in Bangladesh. I have enough experience in captcha entry work.I can entry captchas about 4000-5000 within 6 hours in a day if your site is fast. So according to your requirment. If work is big quanity then price is $3 per 1000 captchas. I can agree with you do your own work.If you desire to contact me email id: work_in_house@yahoo.com. My phone +883792009216. Please contact me if you interested to me then i will give you my best work. I have lot of worker like computer entry related work.

And a couple big players:

shkilur rahaman shohel Says:

Hi!!! Hope you are doing well. We the leading Data processing company in Bangladesh. Presently we are processing 100000+ captcha per day by our 30 operators. We have a well set up and We can give the law rate for the captcha solving.

Our rate $2 per 1000 captcha.yahoo,hotmail,mayspace,gmail, facebook etc.

We just wanna make the relationship for long terms. can we go forward? Thank you.

Best Regards
shakilur rahaman shohe

Sadhan Kumar says on 5/28/2008 at 7:03 pm
Dear Sir,

I am Sadhan Kumar from Dhaka, Bangladesh. My email id # sadhan.kum@gmail.com. I am ready for working with your program. I have more experienced in this field. You can also see this like for my running work google, facebook & myspace companies. My firm can enter captchas about 200k within 1 day if your site is fast. So according to your requirment. If work is big quanity then price is $2 per 1000 captchas. I can agree with your any Captcha project. So, I am waiting for your kind reply.
Best Regards

Sadhan Kumar
Dhaka, Bagladesh