[a model Turing Machine]
CAPTCHAs represent “one of the rare moments when the invisible war being waged between spammers and programmers becomes visible to you, the prey.” The users, and their experience, are the victims, “the prey,” pitted against a so-called criminal element in the marketplace that seeks to corrupt the Internet experience for illegal profit. Spam is unsanctioned, not (yet) illegal, because it operates (as) outside (as possible) of an entrenched system of capitalism on the Internet. Spam is not how we do it here, Melissa Mayer might say. One noteworthy way to beat CAPTCHAs is the “brute force” method, which tasked one person or a group of people, not a computer program, with solving thousands of CAPTCHAs manually, rendering the test obsolete.