Been playing a lot with blackhat stuff and writing PHP scripts to spam your links to as many places as possible. Most of these forums, guestbooks and blogs now have captchas but there’s a few ways around them. You can setup a crappy porn site and get people to solve captchas to see your content. You can try to write code that solves them, which is hard. Or you can hire people to solve them.
Someone setup a nice little service to automate (blackhatters sure do like to automate) all this at Captcha Solver. I heard about something like this at ha.ckers.org. You register as a user, incorporate the API into your code and are charged roughly 2 cent per captcha. Eastern europeans and others register as a worker and presumably get paid 1 cent or less to solve the captchas. Interesting.
A notice on the homepage tells me that people from Ireland are not allowed to sign up as workers for some reason. Damn. I wanted to spend the summer solving captchas for 1 cent each…. what a shite job.
If you could do say 15 a minute, you could make more the Irish minimum wage. Which will be €7.79 as of July 1st this year.