The New York Times is reporting that previous studies from various Internet security firms claiming spammers have devised a program capable of cracking Google's CAPTCHA system may be off the mark. Brad Taylor, a Google software engineer known as the "Spam Czar" is claiming that the system is being foiled not by an automatic program, but in an old fashioned way-good old manual labor. That's right. Apparently there are people in third world countries being paid $3 a day to crack the codes.

"You can see it is clearly done by humans," Mr. Taylor said. "There are patterns in the rate we find bogus accounts, like at night time and when people get off work," in certain parts of the world.

Good work if you can get it, I suppose. However, although spammers may still be relying on humans to crack CAPTCHA systems, it's pretty much a given that one day, they won't have to anymore, and that's when the free email services are really going to be in trouble!