[seqfan] Re: Email addresses

[Joerg Arndt]

* Rick Shepherd <rlshepherd2 at gmail.com> [Aug 06. 2009 09:19]:
> 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.

Wow:
 Description: Determine whether this book can be a textbook
 Time Allotted: 60 minutes
 Reward: $0.01

Sickening.  This should be illegal.

I never thought about Amazon as a "good" company,
this puts it into my list of "evil" companies.

> 
> (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
> 


> [...]