Author Topic: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.  (Read 1221 times)

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Online bigheadfred

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How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.
The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

She asked me name my foe then. I said the need within some men to fight and kill their brothers without thought of Love or God. Ken Hensley

Online bigheadfred

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Re: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2019, 06:22:48 pm »
I don't know if this has been posted before.

Interesting read.

Probably something you have seen, @mystery-ak. How many guests are fake?
She asked me name my foe then. I said the need within some men to fight and kill their brothers without thought of Love or God. Ken Hensley

Online mystery-ak

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Re: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
« Reply #2 on: January 19, 2019, 06:39:54 pm »
@ABX

ABX is better at answering this question.

We do have a lot of guests...

Many are bots and many are actual readers/lurkers...we have a live feed to twitter which brings a lot of people here to read the news.
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Online bigheadfred

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Re: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
« Reply #3 on: January 19, 2019, 08:21:15 pm »
For those who don't want too read the article, another part:

Our politics are fake.

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots.
The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

She asked me name my foe then. I said the need within some men to fight and kill their brothers without thought of Love or God. Ken Hensley