[Sigia-l] Anti-social networks

[Listera]

What begets what is an interesting phenomenon online because of the velocity
and variety of development. My all time favorite is the "captcha conundrum"
(the little hard-to-read images that sites put up to "eliminate" automated
spammers, email address harvesters, etc). Spammers now pay humans (a la
Amazon's Mechanical Turk) to parse captchas on given sites and manually
enter values, which then unlocks entry to deeper levels of the site. So blog
owners/devs congregated to commiserate about spammers that begat captchas
which in turn congregated spammers to invent an artful solution of paying
pennies to armies of people in developing countries to manually break the
captcha barrier. Power of networks indeed. ;-)

----
Ziya

"If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, the size of the team is too
large."