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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

#281

Post by tripzilch »

MartinCron wrote: post #267
tripzilch wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about we just make a "blacklist" of these known bots, look up every user agent, and compare against the blacklist? So now every single request to your site has to do a substring match against every single term in this list. Depending on your site's implementation, this is probably not trivial to do without taking some sort of performance hit . ???! Excuse me? Are you programmers? Efficient substring matching is…

This is entirely honor system, though. All of the user-agent checking has to be layered with the other bot-removal techniques. Malicious users will always fake user agent strings.

Of course. But you also need to make sure you don't accidentally count the non-malicious bots that have known UA strings but just happen to crawl all over the place, including ads.

I mean it's a good (and cheap) first pass to throw out quite a number of true positives.

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

#282

Post by [deleted] »

tripzilch wrote: post #273
vampirechicken wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

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

#283

Post by dredmorbius »

biot wrote: post #265
dredmorbius wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Any Linux equivalents or Java classes which offer similar capabilities (we're using a Java-based application server / webserver).

It works off of checking the SYN packet [0], which happens at the transport layer [1]. Once it gets to the application layer the information is not available unless the transport layer stores the information and provides a method to query a given connection. [0] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/filter.html#osfp [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

I suspected something like this, but was hoping enough of the signature might survive for a daemon (or Java class acting as one) to take a peek.

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

#284

Post by skeletonjelly »

eblume wrote: post #221
xentronium wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened? Is reddit offline again or something?

There is (subjectively) a marked deterioration of comment quality on front-page discussions in the past few days, I feel. I have also noticed that HN articles are getting linked on reddit more frequently (I use both networks, but for highly disparate purposes - gotta get those funny .gif's somewhere). No data supporting this but I fell it's a trend and I'm not liking it.

Few days? Try since forever. As people increase the SNR gets larger. Even on reddit when it started, it was heavily tech focused, you'll find a comment that says it's going downhill. Hard to say what the numbers on HN are like growth wise in comparison to reddit (which has their subscriber numbers on display).

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

#285

Post by samstave »

praxulus wrote: post #269
samstave wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, your paranoid schizophrenic approach is counter-productive. Really, now I am a paranoid schizophrenic? Just because I make claims which are readily confirmed and were completely available in the media - even the EFF filed suit on the AT&T events... Yet, for some reason, it is my responsibility to educate everyone every single time someone new comes along who hasn't been following these things closely. Now I am…

He's not arguing with you, he can't be using a strawman. He's just pointing out that other people will be distracted by your tone, making them ignore your (mostly correct) message.

Thanks. In that case, I will try to be less emotional about this issue.

When I was talking about China hacking lockheed as far back as 2005, everyone said I was nuts! (I freaking worked at lockheed!)

There needs to be a better way to log and track this stuff so that we can point people to some sort of Tyranny Wiki.

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

#286

Post by dboat »

samstave wrote: post #250
SwellJoe wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But, your paranoid schizophrenic approach is counter-productive. Really, now I am a paranoid schizophrenic? Just because I make claims which are readily confirmed and were completely available in the media - even the EFF filed suit on the AT&T events... Yet, for some reason, it is my responsibility to educate everyone every single time someone new comes along who hasn't been following these things closely. Now I am…

What I am witnessing is someone trying to inform people, while effectively censoring himself by delivering in such a way as impedes its delivery.

You obviously have a vested interest in seeing your "message" be received, so stop ignoring what people are telling you about your tone and change it. Figure out what it is that people do listen to, or else you have no one but yourself to blame when they take issue with your tone.

To wit: Your tone is defensive. Pejoratives and cursing undermine your expression. What you are effectively telling people is that your thoughts are not important enough to merit self-restraint. Detailed explanations following assertions are also helpful.

FWIW, I work in the performance marketing industry and, IMO, the most complicity facebook could be said to have in this issue is in not placing a sufficiently high priority on preventing bots from clicking on their ads. Even if it is a sizable project there, they represent such a large target that the difficulty of the job becomes much greater. I see no salacious story here, other than a company found itself unable to optimize a campaign into profitability, which I think says more about them than facebook. Ho hum, find a different traffic source and move on.

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

#287

Post by sicxu »

alttab wrote: post #199
eytanlevit wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that some users might close the page or hit the "back" button before the $(document).ready() happens, but I can't believe that 70% of the people did that(taking into account that our ad was really targeted and highly relevant to the landing page).

and then we find out drunk or stupid people accidentally click stuff.

drunk or stupid people probably won't click 'back' that quick.

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

#288

Post by johnbenwoo »

kirubakaran wrote: post #227
nhashem wrote: post #162

My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…

I understand that it is challenging for a third party like you to identify the bots. But Facebook has more than enough signal on each user clicking on an ad (friends, posts, location, 'non ad-click activity' to 'ad-click activity' ratio) to determine if that user is a bot. Looks like they are choosing to not do anything with this information. "FB is turning a blind eye to keep their revenue" seems to stand up to Occa…

FB turning a blind eye towards shady a advertising practice because it generates revenue? See: Scamville http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming...

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

#289

Post by GoodIntentions »

pbreit wrote: post #268
nhashem wrote: post #162

My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…

Would "white listing" the dozen or so top agents that make up the vast majority of traffic work better?

Those are exactly the user agent strings the bot would spoof.

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

#290

Post by don_draper »

nhashem wrote: post #162

My startup is essentially an advertising aggregator (pooling traffic from a variety of publishers and routing it to advertisers) and dealing with things like bot detection is a HUGE chunk of what we work on, technology-wise. Let me try and give you an idea of how deep the rabbit hole can go. - Okay, you want to detect bots. Well, "good" bots usually have a user agent string like, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2…

One quick way to detect bots is to look for a GET request of the robots.txt file
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