11–14 of 14 posts
I have a particular tweet that must've gotten into a twitter bot database. It's old but it gets favorited on a regular basis by bots which are (I'm assuming) trying to look like real users. Not really related to the article, but I've found it interesting. Anyone else see this behavior?
The problem with looking at registration to identify bots is that it's easy to counteract. Right now, bots use simple methods for generating names, and fill out the form instantly, because there's no incentive not to. Neither of those factors is difficult to change. This article also commits the cardinal sin of telling us the false positive rate without also telling us the false negative rate, or the base rate. You c…
I feel you can get 80% of the way there just by banning the major cloud/dedicated server hosts (ie AWS, Rackspace, Linode)
The problem with looking at registration to identify bots is that it's easy to counteract. Right now, bots use simple methods for generating names, and fill out the form instantly, because there's no incentive not to. Neither of those factors is difficult to change. This article also commits the cardinal sin of telling us the false positive rate without also telling us the false negative rate, or the base rate. You c…
I predict roughly a month till they've circumvented it, if not sooner. A lot of these bots are simple contraptions, and simulating the way real people sign up to services seems to boil down to putting in some timers and a new name generating algorithm.
But if we're talking about some higher degree of prevalence among spam bots, it will be a bit longer. I expect that there are a lot of spam bots out there that are running passively and haven't been touched by their creators in years.