[seqfan] Re: Email addresses

Rick Shepherd rlshepherd2 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 5 20:08:48 CEST 2009


You may be right that most e-mail addresses are harvested by software, but
...

What earlier prompted my comment seen below was some of the tasks I've seen
at a website associated with Amazon, Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), where
usually-very-small tasks are paid (sometimes extremely) small amounts of
money, which essentially makes some people willing "human bots".  In
particular, some "turkers" were being asked to gather e-mail addresses
purportedly for directories of executives and other people from specific
websites, etc.

(There are policies in place to prevent illegal/unethical behavior on that
website but enforcement at least partly depends upon the diligence of a
turker or websurfer to detect that there are problems and report them.).

[Full disclosure:  1) Out of curiosity I earned 57 U.S. cents doing 22
"HITs" (tasks) between Jun 26th and Jul 11th of this year.  2) I still have
an account at that website although I'm not sure why.  3) I had previously
fantasized about earning a livable wage doing OEIS-related (or similar)
tasks through a website or mechanism such as this (i.e., via directed or
undirected "micro-grants").]

Rick



On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 8:46 PM, Joerg Arndt <arndt at jjj.de> wrote:

> * Rick Shepherd <rlshepherd2 at gmail.com> [Aug 05. 2009 09:59]:
> > [...]
>
> >
> > Rick
> >
> > P.S.  In the cat-and-mouse game of hiding and finding e-mail addresses, I
> > believe there are probably large numbers of actual human beings
> collecting
> > large numbers of e-mail addresses for very small wages even as we speak.
>
> No, harvesters are (to my best knowledge) robots.
> Therefore poison pages with generated (invalid)
> email addresses are a good idea  8-)
>
> <etc. removed by rls>



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