• New York Times, Monday, April 26, 2010 1:45 PM

We suppose it was only a matter of time. The New York Times reports that spammers are paying people in developing countries to breach Web site security by solving captchas, which ask visitors to type in a string of semi-obscured characters to prove they are not robots. (The term is apparently a loose acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.")

Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who pioneered the security method, estimates that thousands of people in developing countries, primarily in Asia, are solving these puzzles for pay. "There are a few sites that are coordinated," he tells The Times. "They create the awareness ... Their friends tell their friends, who tell their friends." Still, executives at tech companies like Google tell The Times that they're not worries about people being paid to decode captchas "because they are one of several tools that Web sites use to secure themselves."

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