All of these developments clearly indicate the demand and supply for CAPTCHA breaking services, as well as the potential for abusing the clean domain reputation of the most popular email providers whose continuous emphasis on usability, namely coming up with more user friendly CAPTCHAs, often results in the easy of which the process can be automated.
[From Microsoft’s CAPTCHA successfully broken | Zero Day | ZDNet.com]
But look at the second comment on the story, which makes a point that occurred to me as I was reading the story. I was thinking "hey, can I get some of that software to make life easier for me when I’m posting blog comments?". More than once I’ve had a quick thought while reading someone’s blog post, clicked on "comment", typed in a quick note and then given up when I’ve typed in the wobbly writing incorrectly a couple of times. As the commenter points out, if the cracking software can read the codes better than many people can, so there will be a demand for that software from people who want to use it for legitimate access!
And, by the way, if you authenticate yourself with OpenID, as I just did on Faster Future, why should you need to read the wobbly writing at all? Surely one of the most important attributes that OpenID could share is "is_a_real_person" or something similar.
