Saturday, December 02, 2006

Article: Sweatshops: The Ultimate Botnet?

"Pay people 2 cents an hour to click on ads and spam blogs. Computers should make most of these jobs obsolete. ... Every now and then you read stories about how people in the Third World are being paid to perform repetitive tasks to assist in fraudulent Internet schemes."

I have read all sorts of weird stuff, but this is a new one on me. These are human sweatshop botnets where people in third world countries are paid a small amount of money to perform repetitive tasks that used to be done by computers.

I am assuming that the criminals had to go to low cost labor to get around the technology stopgaps that were put in place to stop this stuff from happening. For example, I am manually approve all comments to this blog, and I have remove all the spam I find.

It always amazes me what people will do for a buck. Is the next big thing going to be exploiting low wage labor in the cyberworlds like 'Second Life' to make stuff?

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