Turks, Mechanical and Otherwise
Turks, Mechanical and Otherwise: “
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — named after the famous 18th century chess-playing automaton — is a so-called crowdsourcing system for farming out small tasks to (paid) human beings because they’re unsuitable for automation by computers.
reCAPTCHA, meanwhile, is another crowdsourcing app which repurposes the CAPTCHA spam-trapping technique. CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test that screens out automated spamming by presenting a sample of randomly-generated text that can’t be read by computers, but which humans can decipher to prove they’re not spambots.
reCAPTCHA cleverly builds on this by presenting content from actual scanned books which failed in the OCR process, and so the humans deciphering the text are actually helping, perhaps unwittingly, in a massive transcription project to put important archive material online.
Now, last Friday the O’Reilly Radar blog was hit by a massive wave of comment spam, which managed to get through their reCAPTCHA filters. After some investigation it transpires that the spam was actually coming from human beings, not spambots. Furthermore the network traffic all originated in Turkey.
The punchline… Spammers have developed their own version of Mechanical Turk, only this one uses real Turks!
File under: Postmodernism/Irony/You-couldn’t-make-this-up.
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(Via plus six.)
