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I love Mechanical Turk. We used it at my agency where we were having a big problem with time clock fraud (a.k.a. people were asking their friends to punch them

I love Mechanical Turk. We used it at my agency where we were having a big problem with time clock fraud (a.k.a. people were asking their friends to punch them out and then leaving hours early) So I built a very simple add on to our timeclock (which is essentially an ELO touch screen and a PC) and had it use a web cam to take a picture of each person punching. Then we created a program that showed turk users a person's badge picture and then the picture taken at the punch and asked "Is this the same person?" (with answers of Yes/No/Maybe) Doing that virtually eliminated the problem overnight. I agree with the author that M.T. won't completely change the market. But what it will do is allow people to monitize their spare seconds and in doing so make a lot of the "no-brainer" grunt work that companies have to do a lot cheaper

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derefr 18y ago
You just inspired me for a CAPTCHA replacement. Simply asking questions can't work because we either have to have a preformulated DB of questions and answers (which could be cracked easily) or have to generate the question from a simple enough formula that a computer could derive the answer. How about, instead, we generate CAPTCHA questions on-demand from humans? Or, even better, don't bother with an automated Turing Test at all: just pay people to have a short conversation with the possible bot, and then say whether they think they're human or not.
- shalmanese 18y ago
  Except MTurk and other similar services make the entire concept of CAPTCHA's obsolete with the ability to pay people to solve any human distinguishing task.
  - derefr 18y ago
    Actially, I believe this becomes a variation on the AI-Box experiment: ask the tester to not just distinguish the humanity of the challenger, but also to determine whether the challenger is a user with an honest goal to use the website, or an MT-employed opponent. The spammer can then only win if they can convince the tester to "let them out." Interestingly, with both the challenger and tester being average humans that are badly- or un-trained on being on either side of a social engineering attack, the effectiveness of this technique will depend totally on the statistical ratio of cunning to cynicism in the average human being.
  - silentOpen 18y ago
    Except MTurk imposes a micro-cost on the attacker... until you proxy captchas into something else ("Turing porn farm"). Of course, using MTurk to generate captcha's is also a micro-cost so I don't know if you win at all (but Amazon does!).

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derefr 18y ago

You just inspired me for a CAPTCHA replacement. Simply asking questions can't work because we either have to have a preformulated DB of questions and answers (which could be cracked easily) or have to generate the question from a simple enough formula that a computer could derive the answer. How about, instead, we generate CAPTCHA questions on-demand from humans? Or, even better, don't bother with an automated Turing Test at all: just pay people to have a short conversation with the possible bot, and then say whether they think they're human or not.

shalmanese 18y ago
Except MTurk and other similar services make the entire concept of CAPTCHA's obsolete with the ability to pay people to solve any human distinguishing task.
- derefr 18y ago
  Actially, I believe this becomes a variation on the AI-Box experiment: ask the tester to not just distinguish the humanity of the challenger, but also to determine whether the challenger is a user with an honest goal to use the website, or an MT-employed opponent. The spammer can then only win if they can convince the tester to "let them out." Interestingly, with both the challenger and tester being average humans that are badly- or un-trained on being on either side of a social engineering attack, the effectiveness of this technique will depend totally on the statistical ratio of cunning to cynicism in the average human being.
- silentOpen 18y ago
  Except MTurk imposes a micro-cost on the attacker... until you proxy captchas into something else ("Turing porn farm"). Of course, using MTurk to generate captcha's is also a micro-cost so I don't know if you win at all (but Amazon does!).