[Asrg] hiring challenge responders

Vernon Schryver <vjs@calcite.rhyolite.com> wrote:

 > Let's do some arithmetic.  At $10/hour and 10 seconds per challenge
 > answered or account created, the cost would be about $0.03 address.
 > That sounds a little but not very high to send mail until the
 > challenge whitelist entry is deleted by the spam target.  It sounds
 > low for a valid sender account that can be used for millions of
 > messages for days until the free provider notices enough bounces
 > or receives a complaint and terminates it.

Does anybody have any actual numbers on how good a return spammers get on 
their spam, in terms of, say, cents per thousand spams?  I suspect this 
will be very hard to measure for spam that works indirectly (like 
getting people to go to a URL that does not have an embedded tracking 
number), and vastly different per category, but there may be SOME hard 
data out there....

 > Free providers often impose delays of more than 10 seconds for
 > account creation.

Heck, that much delay can be imposed by normal data processing, web 
congestion, etc....

 > That can be handled by giving your $10/hour
 > employees big monitors and have them run several windows
 > simultaneously to overlap with the delays.

I don't think it need even require large monitors and manual task 
switching.  It should be relatively simple (i.e., at most a month's 
programming) to automate everything but the image interpretation.  If it 
presents a steady stream of images to a human, it could get the time 
each down to maybe two or three seconds.  Within a minute, I've thought 
of a whole architecture for such a system, with modular screen parsing 
for different providers, and configgable so you can keep up with changes 
in their screens.  Of course I'll leave it as an exercise for the 
lurking spammers and spam-symps, but I can easily imagine someone 
writing this sucker and selling it to spammers.

-- 
David J. Aronson, Unemployed Software Engineer in the Washington DC area
See http://destined.to/program/ for online resume and other information.

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