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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Why would Amazon vet the requests? People can choose whether to take part in any particular project.

The one fascinating angle I could think of is crowdsourcing something that is harmless and legal if done once in isolation but becomes harmful and dangerous when done on a huge scale. My brain is totally failing me here on a coming up with a good example but it seems conceivable (and diabolical!)

One papercut is a nuisance 100 million is another thing altogether.

Something with stock manipulation could work. Buy a ton of options in some company, like Palm for instance. Then on the release of some hot new gadget, like the Pre, pay a ton of people to wait outside the doors of the vendors. Initial buzz will be that Palm is going to strike it big. Cash in.

This reminds me of a guy which used Craigslist to hire decoys for armored truck robbery getaway:

http://news.cnet.com/bank-robber-hires-decoys-on-craigslist-...

If it were in a movie you'd say 'no way', but to see it in real life... I'd hate to be that guard, being pepper-sprayed is not nice, but otherwise this 'heist' has me with ambiguous feelings towards the robber.

However, there would be a record of the entire thing in Amazon's system, not to mention that a huge audience of potential Mechanical Turk workers would see the offer - it seems likely that at least one would be suspicious and try to notify an authority.

What if they told people to stand in line at the store next to Palm? Since there's a finite amount of space, they'll naturally overflow. To an outside observer, it looks like all these folks are standing in line for Palm - particularly if you do the same thing at 1000 locations nationwide, and let journalists connect the dots.

It's also far less traceable. Instead of paying 50,000 people to stand in line outside of Palm, you're paying 50 people each to stand in line outside of 1000 different local businesses, whose only connection is that they happen to be next to a Palm store. A just-as-plausible explanation is that you're organizing a "buy local!" protest that day.

You could also pay people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to pay turkers to stand in line, making things even harder to track. Now instead of one guy paying 50 people each to stand in front of 1000 different locations, you have 50 guys, each one of which is paying people to stand outside Subway, or McDonalds, or Verizon, or the corner bookstore, or whatever happens to be next to that Palm store.

Is that actually illegal?

Yes.

How about you pay everyone in China to jump up and down until we crash into the moon?

http://qntm.org/?moving - last entry at the bottom.

That naively assumes that you jump up then fall. They could simply climb up steps and drop down, thus resulting in a net movement. Over time we would move into moon collision orbit.

Pay people for a DDOS?

That's what botnets are for.

so you won't have to pay the people?

My understanding is you can hire botnets. It would be far cheaper than Mechanical Turk for something like a DDOS.

One obvious application is using MTurk to solve CAPTCHAs.

Isn't that what 4chan is for?

What if somebody asked people to write something profane? Or political? Or perhaps deface the image of an icon or religious leader? Once you move past written messages, you open up all sorts of avenues. Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn? Crowd-sourced violence? Etc. At what point does Amazon need to filter these requests?

> Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn?

So?

When it's illegal? There's a huge difference between crowd sourcing violence and writing something political (which a lot of people already get payed to do), ones organized crime the other is not.

While I don't doubt that everyone has their price... I think you would find it cost-prohibitive to pay enough people to do something like that to have any sort of real-world impact.

People are not going to go out of their way, or risk jail time, for $1.00/task. You'd need to pony up a lot more money (like, I'm guessing, 100's of thousands of dollars) to get enough people to violate basic principles on a large enough scale for this to create some sort of shift.

If they're in India, and breaking laws in say the US, I doubt they'd care too much.

I don't see any problem as long as they're not asking them to break any laws. Ultimately it's up to the parties involved to obey the law though. If someone puts an ad for a hitman in the help wanted section of the newspaper, should the newspaper be held responsible?

Perhaps Amazon could crowd source this?

After all, for someone to get anywhere doing ill with MTurk the request must be seen by people.

On demand viral marketing or protests...

I do think it is very interesting to see the faces behind Mechanical Turk.

Surely they should be vetting to ensure the job is legal and doesn't break any laws.

If they were to do so, beyond merely making people agree to terms of service that prohibit such things, they would very likely open themselves up to a lot more legal liability. If they did claim to review and filter projects, and they missed one, they could then be liable for whatever horrible things happened as a result of someone performing the task. I'm pretty sure being a neutral exchange, where both buyer and seller beware (though each has processes for remedying lack of performance or lack of payment), is a safer model for Amazon.

On top of the seeming additional liability Amazon would be inflicting on themselves, I can't see any upside to Amazon going to extra lengths. It would anger project creators to have to wait for human approval for every project, it would likely reduce the number of jobs underway at any given time (making it less profitable for them and less lucrative a market for service providers), and it would increase the expense of running the market at human scale rather than computer scale (even if they somehow figured out how to use Mechanical Turk itself to provide the vetting). In short, vetting jobs would be a recipe for a fiery death for Mechanical Turk.

Uh,

Perhaps considerations of aiding and abetting prostitution, kidnapping and drug-dealing would enter if the job requests were entirely unvetted?

Uh, and I think India has labor laws too.

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