With the number of people openly discussing CAPTCHA solving techniques and posting examples, the efficacy of the CAPTCHA as a method for curbing spam is becoming questionable at best. People are automating CAPTCHA decoding left right and center, and those few CAPTCHAs that can’t be easily automated are simply run through services like captchasolver.com which use Amazons Mechanical Turk API (at least, I think it uses Mechanical Turk. I may be wrong.)
At any rate, blackhat-seo.com just posted a great list of CAPTCHA breaking resources, so if you are interested in reading more about how to break CAPTCHAs, or you are just interested in seeing how ubiquitous CAPTCHA breaking has become, I recommend you head over there and check it out.
Old post, I know, but thanks for posting this. Finally got around to picking up programming, so I’m automating lots of crap lately. Cracking captchas was next on my list of things to attempt, but I wasn’t quite sure how to begin beyond Eli’s posts.
Anyway, blah blah blah, thanks man.