captcha killer

Even though captcha was originally designed to serve purpose of preventing malicious users or robots to submit html form,  there are (and always are) still people who need to kill it.  There are many different algorithms to read captcha and returns them as text.  Either direct purpose captcha killer or ocr (such as gocr under GNU/Linux) can be used to solve the same problem which depends on kinds of captcha we are dealing with at hand.  Each algorithm will have different limitations.

However, while I was searching on google about this topic, I found an interesting service by a Chinese-based company:

http://imagetotext.com/

I like their idea.  I guess they set up a call centre-like office where their staffs sit in front of computers and type whatever they see on the screens.  They should develop some kind of libraries which will send all captcha to their office which are when they are being translated by HUMAN and returned back to the caller function.  This way, I believe there is no captcha on earth that they can't solve!

It is a paid service of course.  Consult them when you really need to kill severely difficult captcha such as hotmail's.