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Amazon Mechanical Turk gets an evil twin
Would you perform a simple 2-second task in exchange for free porn?
Online criminals are betting that you will. In a clever variation on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, they are asking the public to enter captcha code to unlock the gates to nudie pictures (see picture below the fold), researchers at Panda Labs found.
The so-called captcha human verification codes in this instance was streamed directly from Yahoo, and allows the gang to amass tons of email addresses. But it could also be used to leave spam comments on blogs and news websites.
Amazon Mechanical Turk already has demonstrated that people will perform tasks for seemingly ridiculous sums as low as 1 cent. A certain news website once experimented with paying 2 cents for people to submit news stories to Digg.com – not to rig the system but simply to put it in there. The test resulted in a temporary ban by Digg.com.
But the point is that people will do legitimate things for 1 or 2 cents. People will download nefarious applications such as Zango because they are promised porn. One day they will help break into ecommerce stores for some freebie.
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October 30, 2007 at 12:59 AM | Permalink
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A useful technique for many purposes, including in our own sphere the healing through laughter therapy. It combines action and motivation with reward. A Pavlovian tool.
Posted-by: Laughter Therapy | 12 Jan 2008 17:10:24
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