Oh joy. John Quartermain points to an all-too-convincing account by Charles Arthur in the Guardian, The price of humans who’ll spam blogs is falling to zero.
All those $100 laptops that will be flooding the poorest parts of the third world…know what many of them will be used for? That’s right: filling in captcha‘s and defeating other Turning tests designed to block spam. After all, the places the laptops are going are the places where hourly wages are at the lowest.
It may be that the graphics on those machines aren’t good enough for gold farming and other related activities in MMORPGs. Or they might be.
Major multinational advertising companies are already hiring “sleeper cells” of shills in cheaper-labor countries than the USA:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001182.html