Thoughts and Prayers with Dang during this attack !
Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
491–500 of 513 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#492There are apps currently make multi six figures a month with "AI girlfriend services". Not for me but it apparently is worth paying for to some people. But hell, one time I was scrolling through this hot person's Instagram and it took me a good minute or two to realize the whole account was a generative AI account, almost tricked me. Give it another decade and we can reevaluate.
https://microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/ with AI-generated people!
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately there's no proof that the spam accounts are linked to said site. If I were a competitor to the linked account and wanted to cause then damage, I could run a bot campaign purporting to be from them in order to get them kicked off their provider.
That’s possible, and is why the providers investigate (using the account history that we don’t have access to). Often, other customer data - or a 5 minute phone call - is enough for the provider to tell the difference.
You say this from experience? As a spammer or service provider investigator?
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#494Interesting that this wasn’t baked in as a preventative method for repeat usernames. Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code… Amateur stuff. Never seen it happen before though!
I like how all of you keep demeaning the spammer as being amateur or less than script kiddie. And yet, he bested you, the supposedly experts at web dev and hyperscaling. You create trillions of dollars of value. And yet, your social hot spot is beyond laughably bad at handling that "incompetent" attacker.
Since you are othering the parties concerned, mind sharing more info on the attacker?
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#495Oh my god, you aren’t kidding. As of right now, there’s 350 (plus or minus a few) dead spam comments at the bottom of this page. Someone obviously misplaced a decimal somewhere - you obviously don’t want to flood a forum with THAT many bot messages.
I don't think we're dealing with the cream of the crop here. They're not even smart enough to have it make up new, plausible user names.
Their IPs and emails might tell a different story and this could also be a threat. But to what end?
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#496Interesting that this wasn’t baked in as a preventative method for repeat usernames. Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code… Amateur stuff. Never seen it happen before though!
Really wonder, if this kind of spam is the perfect application for an LLM based agent.
For what, the pure joy of burning money?
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't use Discord anymore but the phone number thing seems new, in the past I was able to visit as a guest and be able to read messages but not chat. Then again Twitter and Reddit are doing the same thing now and forcing people to log in, so I'm not surprised. Considering how many community groups and open source projects now use a Discord in place of a public forum this looks like a disaster going forwards since a…
It's a per-server setting. Ranges from phone verification to email verification to minimum account age.
That isn’t what is being discussed. This is a separate account-wide lockout.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
I clicked on the Discord link in the spam message for fun, entered a random username, and immediately got asked to verify with my phone number before I could even read the messages in the chatroom. HN doesn't need to do that and I don't want them to do that, but a simple captcha or a proof of work algo like what Cloudflare uses would at least slow down the flood of bot accounts.
That’s the Orwellian way that discord cracks down on users that it deems, for whatever reason, “suspicious”. It is tied to the IP address and anything else associated with it, but if you had an existing account before the flag then that account won't be flagged, only new accounts. There is no appeal process and they won’t even tell you what your offense was. Unfortunately I’ve had to pay for an extra cell phone line…
This "suspicious activity" can even be triggered if you click the wrong invite link, although you have no way to tell where it leads you anyway.
Discord sadly was pretty successful to lure in users and even a lot of devs build their community there. I think it is a bad choice because of lacking discoverability and the proprietary nature of the platform. It feels lively because it is a chat. But otherwise most projects are better hosted elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#499Interesting that this wasn’t baked in as a preventative method for repeat usernames. Which is also ironic because why would this guy reuse the same username for his little spam campaign when it can be nuked in one line of code… Amateur stuff. Never seen it happen before though!
I like how all of you keep demeaning the spammer as being amateur or less than script kiddie. And yet, he bested you, the supposedly experts at web dev and hyperscaling. You create trillions of dollars of value. And yet, your social hot spot is beyond laughably bad at handling that "incompetent" attacker.
Is that you? yt/@gertop6402 Just guessing.. anywho, your nick signals SEO knowledge and reasons to hide.
Re: Ask HN: Is Hacker News under attack from spam bots?
#500What a mess, this is literally the first time I saw something like this on HN. They've even started posting on this thread! HN has been running slow since the flood started and I wonder if it's causing a mini-DDoS effect. The usernames of the spammers are "2genders ", "SEXMCNIGGA ", and "indianmilf "; for some strange reason they keep the same prefix and just alter the number so it should be easy for admins to block…
The reason is that they are just trying to cause chaos. They do not have any real goal other than that.