Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Not always true that a "broken clock is right twice a day" ..


 . because if the clock is just a little hasty, it can be wrong for a very long time.

On 4/05/2016 -- eight days after its unilateral suspension -- the AMT support team finally restored requester data for Babylon's account.


But all twenty-two months' worth of HIT data were tagged as "pending review."  
I had to mark hundreds of old HITs manually as "already reviewed" -- call it 1,100 mouseclicks,

 Laws of the House of God, #8:   THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE.

Monday, April 4, 2016

AMT support team: AMT results have no value

Amazon Web Services may provide cloud-based support for "critical business operations" of major US and international corporations, but they don't know how to restore a dataset.

 Through its own negligence, AMT Support staff wiped out two years worth of HITs for Babylon's account.  

 But wait .. it gets even stupider.





"Our engineering team has investigated the issue and unfortunately they will not be able to restore account A10TCXJSVAY7YJ to its status prior to suspension. We'd like to credit your account for the $5.40 in Prepaid HITs outstanding ,,,"

 (Their cited $5.40 is just an artifact of the AMT system's misbehavior.  It was [apparently] the deposit for the subset of Prepaid HITs which hadn't yet been performed).



 In other words: Amazon values all cumulative data from the compromised account (including the 03/27/2016 batch of 150 HITs plus the entire body of HITs published over two years) at $0.00.

 But I'm sure I paid them more than that ...