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Busy little bots behind the scenes — 12 Comments

  1. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spam, against the bots, against the powers of this dark web and against the spiritual forces of evil in the digital realms.

  2. > Most of these bots are from places in China and Russia or Ukraine

    Yep. I tried opening the ssh port on my machine for a while so I could access it remotely. After a couple of weeks reading the logs of how many attempts were made to get in through that port I closed it up again. I didn’t think it likely that anyone would make it through, but why worry about it? The marginal utility wasn’t worth it.

  3. I’m too lazy to look up the source right now, but not so long ago, I read that bot and anti-bot traffic makes up a substantial part of all internet traffic. They’re not just background noise. Somebody’s paying for it. Does anybody know whether the so-called net neutrality issue would affect bot/antibot traffic? Silly question?

    I understand that Neo’s commenters aren’t generally a techie crowd, but there seem to be a few exceptions, so I thought I’d ask.

  4. Then it started creeping back up to about 1500 a day. Again, I have no idea why

    yes you do
    its an example of punctuated progress in evolution
    duh

    progress stalls till something is found, then it piles through the opening till the other side finds something, and makes their progress which then makes it moribund

    you can see this all over
    but why look?

  5. Artfldgr:

    What I meant by “I have no idea why” was something far more specific than that.

    In other words, I didn’t know and still don’t know what vulnerability the spammers exploited. I have no idea what the actual mechanism was. I would need to know that in order to do anything about it. I certainly have a very general idea why in terms of the basic principle—the spammers changed something or other that got around something or other in the spam blocking system. That happens in living systems and elsewhere, of course.

  6. Clearly this is the evidence we seek tying the Trump Campaign to the Russians in a collusionary sort of way. Right?

  7. As a Chief Info Sec Officer, email and its related vectors account for more than half of organizational breaches.

    On a personal level, they have even suckered home buyers to wire money (20% down) to a wrong account causing the loss of their current and future home.

  8. This is fascinating, please revisit from time to time. One wonders if targets like you are selected because of your profile and content or if its just everywhere. The disproportionate internet censorship on conservatives reminds me of the notion : it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

  9. For those interested in bot traffic, the article I read is “The Growing Problem of Bots That Fight Online.” This was published in “MIT Technology Review” on Sept. 20, 2016.

    The URL is https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602421/the-growing-problem-of-bots-that-fight-online/

    The article’s main purpose is to review an interesting paper about bots that fight each other over Wikipedia edits. At what point will robots dominate internet traffic? Will people then be marginal? How will that change laws and regulations governing the internet? Seems like I know less and less.

    Here are a couple of excerpts that hint at the volume of bot traffic.

    “By some measures, bots account for 49 percent of visits to Web pages and are responsible for over 50 percent of clicks on ads. This impact is set to increase as the number of bots rises exponentially.”

    “One group has estimated that in 2009, a quarter of all tweets were generated by bots.”

  10. I recall Neo mentioning spam before, but I didn’t catch or grasp that it was spam comments.

    Mark30339’s comment reminds me of:
    “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Orwell

    Cornflour’s comment reminds of the moment when Sarah Palin was selected as the VP candidate. I watched the TV coverage for about an hour and then went to the Palin Wiki page. Then I saw that there were 200 accepted edits to that page in the last hour. I assumed those were all human editors, but who knows?

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