Captcha codes are designed to be unreadable by computers, only by humans, so they can be used to lock spambots out of websites. But Google and Websense have determined, by analyzing traffic patterns, that captcha codes are being cracked nightly — not by machines, but by third-world employees. Brad Stone at the New York Times blogs that one Russian-language set of instructions for captcha-cracking promises a minimum $3 per day for the work.

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