Tag Archives: crowd


Faces in the crowd: how crowdsourcing can help people fit into society

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

Sometimes it seems there’s a lot of negativity towards the crowd. Whether it’s images of angry mobs with burning torches or hurtful terms like “mob mentality” and “tyranny of the majority”, our society often seems to favor the individual over the group.

We in the crowdsourcing industry have been working hard to dispel these myths and improve the image of the mob. Research underway at Cambridge University is doing just that, by using the …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing Dar es Salaam Doctor of Philosophy Global Positioning System Mark OpenStreetMap Swahili language Tanzania Ushahidi

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Hatforce: your friendly crowd of hackers

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… drastic solution. Question: what’s the best way to make your system hack-proof? Answer: get a crowd of hackers to test it out, of course.

Top hats

Welcome to Hatforce a “crowdsourcing security testing service” complete with its own crowd of expert hackers. Just to be clear, these guys are white hats – good hackers (as opposed to the “bad” black hats like Anonymous).

As Hatforce CEO Arthur Gervais (who is still just 24 years old) explained to me: “we want to …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing Gabe Newell Hatforce microwork Security testing Sony Steam testing vulnerability Wikileaks

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Crime-sourcing: the dark side of the crowd

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… many legit online businesses – the bad guys are now experimenting with a new online tool: the crowd.

Guilty pleasures

So, how do you convince the crowd to commit crime? Answer: trick them into it. Take this ingenious scam where users (presumably young, spotty males) were given access to free pornography in return for solving CAPTCHAs. The more words they decoded, the more images appeared. Unfortunately, it turned out the CAPTCHA data was being used to break into Yahoo email …

Tags: captcha Computer crime crowd crowdsourcing Denial-of-service attack microwork Misha Glenny Nigeria Sarah Palin Twitter Yahoo! Mail

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VizWiz: what the crowd sees is what you get

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… impressive advances but human-computer expert Jeffrey Bigham believes that, with the help of the crowd, things are about to get much, much better.

Remote assistants

As Professor Bigham points out, purely automated technologies often struggle to cope with the “infinite variability” of reality. Here at Microtask, we’re very familiar with this phenomenon. The whole Digitalkoot project (did I mention we now have almost 50,000 users?) is founded on the fact that OCR scanners can’t …

Tags: Android apple crowd crowdsourcing Disability distributed work iPhone microtask microwork research Speech recognition United States

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Distributed work and data security: can the crowd keep a secret?

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… dilemma. If your business model relies on distributing client data among a vast (often anonymous) crowd of strangers, how do you make sure that any confidential information stays on the QT?

Crowd control

Six years after the launch of Mechanical Turk, crowd labor platforms have become pretty good at extracting high-quality, consistent results from workers. But in some ways, confidentiality is even more crucial than accuracy. A bad data set and you’ll probably have to rerun some tasks. …

Tags: Amazon Mechanical Turk CastingWords crowd Crowdflower crowdsourcing distributed work Julian Assange microtask microwork Scott McNealy Sun Microsystems Wikileaks

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