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Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

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Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#271

Post by kirubakaran »

zburt wrote: post #263
ebtalley wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

data would be * IP addresses, one can assume a bot would only have a set of addresses they could use, barring botnets. * request patterns, ie: did the bot request css/js, etc * request timeframes * UA strings Sure, its a big data problem, but I can imagine that Facebook has solved these types of scenarios many times over.

What if you start a new Amazon EC2 spot instance (netting you a new IP address), start up Chromium in headless mode (say, using Xvfb), navigate to the website of choice, use mouse automation to start clicking around, click the ad, spend 5 minutes clicking around in a semi-choreographed pattern on the advertisee's website, and then shut down the instance -- only to repeat? Moreover, Amazon is always buying new IP subn…

The user from that new IP won't have any real human like history - photos shared and commented on over time etc.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#272

Post by tripzilch »

brador wrote: post #228
tlrobinson wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed this just meant they built something on top of access logs that told them what percentage of page loads also loaded JavaScript. I don't know about your webserver, but mine doesn't tell me this kind of thing out of the box. Anyway, it's pretty irrelevant whether they added logging in their app (one line of code?) or enabled their webserver's built in logging.

Surprised no ones mentioned the noscript plugin. Since the user is on facebook they'd have facebook unblocked, but noscript still blocking everything else. How would you discern a noscript user from bot?

> How would you discern a noscript user from bot?

There are a few tricks to do that, described on the old ha.ckers.org weblog, or perhaps on the related sla.ckers.org forum. No idea if they still work, though ..

You could always see if you could trigger NoScript's built-in XSS or frame hijacking protection :) Bots will not notice, and users get a scary warning message and believe your ad is trying to hack them. Not good for your conversion rates, but a pretty sure way to tell them apart.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#273

Post by tripzilch »

vampirechicken wrote: post #119
wpietri wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be a businessperson's interpretation of what happened. Or they might have indeed reinvented it. Kids these days and their Heroku! Back in my day we'd process each HTTP request by hand. And we'd do it uphill both ways in the snow.

using awk.

You had awk? Ha! Luxuries! Why when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the re- sults around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#274

Post by kragen »

rio517 wrote: post #57
reustle wrote: post #49

Copying the text just incase FB decides they don't like it --- Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us…

And here is a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/4hu66.png

I don't understand why you would post that here. Can you explain?

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#275

Post by tripzilch »

SwellJoe wrote: post #231
samstave wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think I make this shit up? There are some really naive and stupid people on HN that have zero grasp on the history of intelligence agencies.

So, this is why people don't take you seriously. I know a couple of guys like you in my local activist community, who take a very hostile "I know the truth and you're all fools!" attitude, despite the fact that their audience is mostly very sympathetic to most of their assertions. We know spying on the Internet takes place; HN is full of cantankerous old Internet geeks who've seen, first-hand, plenty of examples of t…

Hey, calling people "schizophrenic" is not cool. Just sayin'.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#276

Post by jakejake »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #217
reustle wrote: post #49

Copying the text just incase FB decides they don't like it --- Hey everyone, we're going to be deleting our Facebook page in the next couple of weeks, but we wanted to explain why before we do. A couple months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Limited Run, we started to experiment with Facebook ads. Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us…

> in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled // I use noscript. When I enable it for visits it's usually by enabling the domain itself and leaving third-party scripts disabled. Depending on your area this could be significant. Also the possibility of blocking of the scripts by other elements not loading - for example if the browser can't parallelise the requests…

I think unless you run a forum for javascript virus injection techniques, you're not going to see 80% visitors with disabled javascript.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#277

Post by geori »

zburt wrote: post #263
ebtalley wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

data would be * IP addresses, one can assume a bot would only have a set of addresses they could use, barring botnets. * request patterns, ie: did the bot request css/js, etc * request timeframes * UA strings Sure, its a big data problem, but I can imagine that Facebook has solved these types of scenarios many times over.

What if you start a new Amazon EC2 spot instance (netting you a new IP address), start up Chromium in headless mode (say, using Xvfb), navigate to the website of choice, use mouse automation to start clicking around, click the ad, spend 5 minutes clicking around in a semi-choreographed pattern on the advertisee's website, and then shut down the instance -- only to repeat? Moreover, Amazon is always buying new IP subn…

I dont count clicks from any amazonaws or ec2 hostnames on my site.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#278

Post by tlow »

dangrossman wrote: post #230
pherk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that is really no excuse for not developing a foolproof system. And if you know that you don't have a great system to catch fraud, then you should simply leave some money on the table. See, the essence here is not to come up with a great algorithm. This is not a programming contest. But to create a system where everyone (publisher, advertiser, ad-network and customer) wins. In this very early stage, the success o…

> And that number has to be consistently better than Google's. Why's that? This isn't a zero sum game. You don't advertise only on Google or only on Facebook; as much as your budget allows, you advertise on every channel you can achieve a positive ROI on. For any advertiser looking for a direct response, like a signup or purchase, I doubt anything Facebook can do would make the ROI better than advertising on search.…

Who is the "you" that your post above mentions?

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#279

Post by dangrossman »

tlow wrote: post #278
dangrossman wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that number has to be consistently better than Google's. Why's that? This isn't a zero sum game. You don't advertise only on Google or only on Facebook; as much as your budget allows, you advertise on every channel you can achieve a positive ROI on. For any advertiser looking for a direct response, like a signup or purchase, I doubt anything Facebook can do would make the ROI better than advertising on search.…

Who is the "you" that your post above mentions?

The advertiser.

Re: Company withdrawing from Facebook as analytics show 80% of ad clicks from bots

#280

Post by tripzilch »

stef25 wrote: post #211
samstave wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That escalated quickly! And so it seems that Facebook could be proven to be the new groupon. I would absolutely not be suprised if the hits were FB bots - however I'd expect they wouldn't be that directly stupid so as to have an Ad-bot net in house. Surely this is some service they outsource for plausible deniability. Something they would have learned from their relationship handing all user data over to the NSA/CIA.…

What user data stored on FB servers could be useful to intelligence agencies of that level? People brag about crimes they committed, IP addresses are logged and people may "like" jihad but criminals targeted by the NSA are surely not at that level of stupidity. Also, FB may not have much of a choice to comply with those agencies, or find themselves pissing off a lot of high level people by refusing to comply with gov…

> What user data stored on FB servers could be useful to intelligence agencies of that level? People brag about crimes they committed, IP addresses are logged and people may "like" jihad but criminals targeted by the NSA are surely not at that level of stupidity.

It's not what people brag about, it's the social graph itself that's useful. All the other things like photo-tagging are extra candy.

More info at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al... and http://nplusonemag.com/leave-your-cellphone-at-home . Sorry it's late out here, or I'd copy/paste the relevant quotes for you--look for the bits about data mining and machine learning, especially in the 2nd article, everything is a signal and they do have the computing power to process it all, apply Bayesian belief nets, algorithms can pull intelligence information about you from the local shape of your social graph that you don't even realize can be inferred from it (humans are not very good at reading complex info from big graphs much further than simple "friend-of-a-friend" relationships).

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