Re: Spam, Spam, Damn Spam
I tend to agree with you (on this). The captchas we use don't completely stop the spammers, but they force them to slow down by several warp factors and use human sweatshop labor to solve the puzzles. Their resulting attack bandwidth is pathetically low.
The cost is higher to use human labor, which begs the question of what possible payoff would justify paying someone even a nickel to solve a Zone captcha. Best I can come up with is that the process is on autopilot and relies on carpet-bombing instead of precision targeting to pay off. We are, in essence, collateral damage in a statistical war.