Re:Mechanical Turk is Insecure
by mkr-hn on Saturday November 02, 2013 @02:42PM
(#6660202)
Mechanical Turk is Amazon's Google Reader. I had to write a whole guide[1] on not getting screwed over by scam requesters because all the tools for it don't exist as part of Mechanical Turk. I don't think Amazon has touched the service since they launched it.
Re:Mechanical Turk is Insecure
by ukd1 on Friday November 01, 2013 @06:44PM
(#6657020)
The only one I've thought of since writing this is to have a separate AWS account and link it as a sub account for billing. Solves someone shutting down your main servers, but still means they can spin stuff up / use lots of cash. This would be a massive pain for us as we'd loose our worker pool. I could do it the other way, move our infrastructure to a new account...but that sounds equally painful.
A new account doesn't have all AWS services enabled by default, so the impact seems minimal to start with. Not sure if you can lock this down further as I haven't looked into it.
Re:Mechanical Turk is Insecure
by mattzito on Friday November 01, 2013 @08:17PM
(#6657484)
Or have it charged to an entirely separate card, one that gets reloaded with money every month to cover planned MT expenses. Annoying, but the safest option, I suspect
Re:Mechanical Turk is Insecure
by ukd1 on Saturday November 02, 2013 @02:39AM
(#6658395)
Well this is the same for most services, I've seen - including MobileWorks? If you register as a worker and you can accept tasks, if you meet the requirements.
It's avoided to some extent by us due to the way we issue training / challenge work before any actual work is given to new workers.
Re:Mechanical Turk is Insecure
by anandkulkarni on Saturday November 02, 2013 @06:58PM
(#6661221)
Not quite: in MobileWorks, work is assigned to private workers, so nothing is public. The same goes for CloudFactory, TaskUs, and the other non-marketplace crowd platforms.
You're right that challenge work does a reasonable job of screening tasks from search engines, though!
[1] http://mkronline.com/2013/09/17/how-to-make-money-with-mecha...
What is the work-around/alternative? Well written post.
http://aws.amazon.com/mfa/
A new account doesn't have all AWS services enabled by default, so the impact seems minimal to start with. Not sure if you can lock this down further as I haven't looked into it.
All in all this is not perfect, but "securer".
It's avoided to some extent by us due to the way we issue training / challenge work before any actual work is given to new workers.
You're right that challenge work does a reasonable job of screening tasks from search engines, though!