fake-clicking on fake websites
December 26, 2018 8:11 AM Subscribe
"Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head." How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
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.”
This seems like yet more evidence that Youtube doesn't even understand the Youtube algorithm. Like, how can that be a risk? How can there be a concern that the algorithm changes it's mind about whether bots or humans are the real people? How is that something it's capable of doing? Why is that something it's theoretically capable of doing?
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:47 AM on December 26, 2018 [11 favorites]
This seems like yet more evidence that Youtube doesn't even understand the Youtube algorithm. Like, how can that be a risk? How can there be a concern that the algorithm changes it's mind about whether bots or humans are the real people? How is that something it's capable of doing? Why is that something it's theoretically capable of doing?
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:47 AM on December 26, 2018 [11 favorites]
Monetizing the web with advertising was a catastrophic mistake.
posted by chrchr at 8:53 AM on December 26, 2018 [59 favorites]
posted by chrchr at 8:53 AM on December 26, 2018 [59 favorites]
Two broad things:
First, the ads industry has started cleaning up this whole fake publishers bidding as real publishers thing with a new file called ads.txt. It sits on the root level of a publisher and lists out the authorized exchanges that are allowed to present the publisher's inventory for bidding. Adoption has been rapid, and the reduction in fraud has been pretty profound. I wouldn't be shocked if soon most demand side platforms began requiring publishers to have one in order to be eligible for bidding.
Second, bot prevention relies on a lot of signals that are increasingly harder to access in a more privacy centric world. Ironically, the GDPR makes it easier to justify using these signals because fraud prevention is a defined purpose and legitimate interest is a reasonable justification to access and use that data (instead of requiring consent). In other words, bot mitigation done properly can be legit in a GDPR world.
Where it breaks down is with the new intelligent tracking prevention (ITP) mechanisms built into Safari. These essentially block access to third party cookies, which removes a pretty important signal for identifying bots in the wild. On the one hand, that's great for privacy and gives Apple a nice selling point for being "privacy friendly," but on the other hand it provides a huge amount of new cover in which spammers and bots can operate.
posted by fremen at 9:16 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
First, the ads industry has started cleaning up this whole fake publishers bidding as real publishers thing with a new file called ads.txt. It sits on the root level of a publisher and lists out the authorized exchanges that are allowed to present the publisher's inventory for bidding. Adoption has been rapid, and the reduction in fraud has been pretty profound. I wouldn't be shocked if soon most demand side platforms began requiring publishers to have one in order to be eligible for bidding.
Second, bot prevention relies on a lot of signals that are increasingly harder to access in a more privacy centric world. Ironically, the GDPR makes it easier to justify using these signals because fraud prevention is a defined purpose and legitimate interest is a reasonable justification to access and use that data (instead of requiring consent). In other words, bot mitigation done properly can be legit in a GDPR world.
Where it breaks down is with the new intelligent tracking prevention (ITP) mechanisms built into Safari. These essentially block access to third party cookies, which removes a pretty important signal for identifying bots in the wild. On the one hand, that's great for privacy and gives Apple a nice selling point for being "privacy friendly," but on the other hand it provides a huge amount of new cover in which spammers and bots can operate.
posted by fremen at 9:16 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
Monetizing the web with advertising was a catastrophic mistake.
- Humanity, epitaph
posted by duffell at 9:25 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
- Humanity, epitaph
posted by duffell at 9:25 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
This has been coming for decades.
I have a friend who registered "localhost.com" back when the internet was new and shiny, and computers weren't always sold with web browsers installed. He immediately started getting spam email from a company that sent out spam with "nobody@localhost.com" as the return address. He sued - and the company that sent the spam counter-sued for defamation, because he told the people who sent angry emails who had spoofed his address.
(End result: nothing. The company had hired an "independent contractor" who used the localhost.com address, and the courts ruled they weren't an agent and so their torts didn't reflect back on the hiring company. And the defamation and RICO claim went exactly nowhere.)
Over twenty years ago, the courts were declaring that "eh, spam isn't so bad; we don't need to penalize the companies that use it. You'll need to prove a lot more damage than clogged servers and angry emails from strangers." And this is the result.
Over ten years ago, one of the Dreamwidth founders wrote Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure (and Part 2). It pointed out:
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:32 AM on December 26, 2018 [16 favorites]
I have a friend who registered "localhost.com" back when the internet was new and shiny, and computers weren't always sold with web browsers installed. He immediately started getting spam email from a company that sent out spam with "nobody@localhost.com" as the return address. He sued - and the company that sent the spam counter-sued for defamation, because he told the people who sent angry emails who had spoofed his address.
(End result: nothing. The company had hired an "independent contractor" who used the localhost.com address, and the courts ruled they weren't an agent and so their torts didn't reflect back on the hiring company. And the defamation and RICO claim went exactly nowhere.)
Over twenty years ago, the courts were declaring that "eh, spam isn't so bad; we don't need to penalize the companies that use it. You'll need to prove a lot more damage than clogged servers and angry emails from strangers." And this is the result.
Over ten years ago, one of the Dreamwidth founders wrote Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure (and Part 2). It pointed out:
It's a fundamental fact of the Internet: people are banner-blind. The Nielsen Norman Group, human/computer interface specialists, do massive amounts of eye-tracking research as a part of their usability studies. Some completely unsurprising conclusions arise: people who have spent any length of time on the Internet have been so saturated with advertisements that they literally stop seeing them. You don't need Adblock Plus; your eyes won't even go anywhere near anything your subconscious has identified as "probably an ad". People ignore ads so thorougly that they even ignore things that look like ads.Combine "no penalties for spam unless someone can prove specific monetary damages AND find a culprit in the right jurisdiction," and "people stop paying attention to ads," and you get "let's make bots that click on ads," in increasingly complex forms.
If someone isn't there to find out information about your product or service, they're not going to click your ad. They're not even going to see your ad.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:32 AM on December 26, 2018 [16 favorites]
posted by Mayor West at 9:39 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
AnhydrousLove:
How can there be a concern that the algorithm changes it's mind about whether bots or humans are the real people? How is that something it's capable of doing? Why is that something it's theoretically capable of doing?
If the algorithm detects bots because their patterns are unusual compared to the majority of traffic (which is assumed to be real people) — well, if things change so that bot traffic is the overwhelming majority, then bots will look normal and real people will look unusual.
It’s all about what you define as the expected “real-people” traffic pattern.
posted by snowmentality at 9:42 AM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
How can there be a concern that the algorithm changes it's mind about whether bots or humans are the real people? How is that something it's capable of doing? Why is that something it's theoretically capable of doing?
If the algorithm detects bots because their patterns are unusual compared to the majority of traffic (which is assumed to be real people) — well, if things change so that bot traffic is the overwhelming majority, then bots will look normal and real people will look unusual.
It’s all about what you define as the expected “real-people” traffic pattern.
posted by snowmentality at 9:42 AM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
Monetizing the web with advertising was a catastrophic mistake.
and yet hardly a surprise given the predominant culture that was behind the "decision" to monetize. I put quotes on decision because I'm not clear that it was that conscious a thing. I turned forty in 1999, one year after I got my first email address, the same year I started getting paid comparatively big Dot.com money, apparently because I was some kind of expert. Vast amounts of lucre were suddenly available and nobody seemed to really have a plan beyond, We Gotta Figure Out A Way To Make A Buck At This Internet Thing Before The Gravy Stops Flowing. And really, the only solution ever seriously on offer (beyond absurdly complicated and pointless DRM systems) seemed to be advertising because well, that's how television worked, and radio before it, and newspapers before that ... and so on. It's how the West did culture, America in particular ...
Capitalism was a catastrophic mistake.
Yeah, I guess. But not really. Only if it's adhered to as some kind of fundamental belief system. But that applies to everything really. Doesn't it?
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
and yet hardly a surprise given the predominant culture that was behind the "decision" to monetize. I put quotes on decision because I'm not clear that it was that conscious a thing. I turned forty in 1999, one year after I got my first email address, the same year I started getting paid comparatively big Dot.com money, apparently because I was some kind of expert. Vast amounts of lucre were suddenly available and nobody seemed to really have a plan beyond, We Gotta Figure Out A Way To Make A Buck At This Internet Thing Before The Gravy Stops Flowing. And really, the only solution ever seriously on offer (beyond absurdly complicated and pointless DRM systems) seemed to be advertising because well, that's how television worked, and radio before it, and newspapers before that ... and so on. It's how the West did culture, America in particular ...
Capitalism was a catastrophic mistake.
Yeah, I guess. But not really. Only if it's adhered to as some kind of fundamental belief system. But that applies to everything really. Doesn't it?
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on December 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
My head is spinning. I just want to be able to read the sports pages without thinking it is fake. Except of course my theory on the NBA. It is rigged. No more real than pro wrestling. But I digress.
Should I assume that 60%of the users on MetaFilter are fake? Or that I am 60% fake?
posted by AugustWest at 10:03 AM on December 26, 2018
Should I assume that 60%of the users on MetaFilter are fake? Or that I am 60% fake?
posted by AugustWest at 10:03 AM on December 26, 2018
I don't know... Do bots have five bucks to spare?
posted by glonous keming at 10:11 AM on December 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by glonous keming at 10:11 AM on December 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
If you're not the fake customer, you're the fake product.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 10:16 AM on December 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
posted by paper chromatographologist at 10:16 AM on December 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
I'm fake, but I'm a solipsist so you're all fake too.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:40 AM on December 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:40 AM on December 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
But that applies to everything really. Doesn't it?
No? How exactly do you propose a human being would operate without a fundamental belief system? Further, how do you explain the inflection point at the beginning of financialized capitalism by the Dutch following the opening of the Americas to large scale European exploitation, if all fundamental belief systems are catastrophic mistakes?
"Everything is equally bad" is just a lazy excuse not to think through consequences.
posted by PMdixon at 10:58 AM on December 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
No? How exactly do you propose a human being would operate without a fundamental belief system? Further, how do you explain the inflection point at the beginning of financialized capitalism by the Dutch following the opening of the Americas to large scale European exploitation, if all fundamental belief systems are catastrophic mistakes?
"Everything is equally bad" is just a lazy excuse not to think through consequences.
posted by PMdixon at 10:58 AM on December 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
It’s true that advertising wasn’t really a decision. What I remember from the early web was that there was a strong desire or belief that things on the web should be free, which kind of kneecapped a subscription model for funding web services. There was also a lot of interest in micropayments, but the technology was not (and is not) ready for that. Advertising felt closer to free than a subscription, and caused less friction as well.
Advertising on the web became much more of a horrible monster than ads in other media, because Internet advertising is mostly programmatic. I think it would have been difficult to foresee the problems this has caused. The promise that you could actually tell if someone engaged with the ad by clicking provided metrics that weren’t available with other forms of advertising, and naturally, those metrics have been gamed to death. Meanwhile, advertising in other media such as print and television are still much more about sales people having human negotiations with brand representatives and shaking meat hands. It’s not about generating clicks directly, but is mostly intended to communicate some message about a brand to consumers. It’s far less quantitative. Local TV and radio have mostly resisted the programmatic, metric based trend. Network TV is a premium, concierge level product. Cable TV is creeping toward a programmatic model, but even so, we don’t yet have legions of zombie cable boxes faking views on cable TV. The web is, so far, unique as a perfect dumpster fire for terrible advertising.
posted by chrchr at 11:23 AM on December 26, 2018 [11 favorites]
Advertising on the web became much more of a horrible monster than ads in other media, because Internet advertising is mostly programmatic. I think it would have been difficult to foresee the problems this has caused. The promise that you could actually tell if someone engaged with the ad by clicking provided metrics that weren’t available with other forms of advertising, and naturally, those metrics have been gamed to death. Meanwhile, advertising in other media such as print and television are still much more about sales people having human negotiations with brand representatives and shaking meat hands. It’s not about generating clicks directly, but is mostly intended to communicate some message about a brand to consumers. It’s far less quantitative. Local TV and radio have mostly resisted the programmatic, metric based trend. Network TV is a premium, concierge level product. Cable TV is creeping toward a programmatic model, but even so, we don’t yet have legions of zombie cable boxes faking views on cable TV. The web is, so far, unique as a perfect dumpster fire for terrible advertising.
posted by chrchr at 11:23 AM on December 26, 2018 [11 favorites]
No? How exactly do you propose a human being would operate without a fundamental belief system?
by adhering to a belief system that stops short of absolute fundamentalism, that is willing to accept at least some grey area, and thus the possibility that other arguments/systems might offer value as well.
Speaking personally, I'm libertarian on most issues but, being Canadian, feel that there is no real freedom without a serious commitment to a social safety net, else there is simply way too much fear in the scenario. So yeah, give me Liberty and in return, I promise to pay my taxes.
posted by philip-random at 11:29 AM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
by adhering to a belief system that stops short of absolute fundamentalism, that is willing to accept at least some grey area, and thus the possibility that other arguments/systems might offer value as well.
Speaking personally, I'm libertarian on most issues but, being Canadian, feel that there is no real freedom without a serious commitment to a social safety net, else there is simply way too much fear in the scenario. So yeah, give me Liberty and in return, I promise to pay my taxes.
posted by philip-random at 11:29 AM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
Related: 3ve BGP Ad hijacking. From the article:
Members of 3ve (pronounced “eve”) used their large reservoir of trusted IP addresses to conceal a fraud that otherwise would have been easy for advertisers to detect. The scheme employed a thousand servers hosted inside data centers to impersonate real human beings who purportedly "viewed" ads that were hosted on bogus pages run by the scammers themselves—who then received a check from ad networks for these billions of fake ad impressions. Normally, a scam of this magnitude coming from such a small pool of server-hosted bots would have stuck out to defrauded advertisers. To camouflage the scam, 3ve operators funneled the servers’ fraudulent page requests through millions of compromised IP addresses.
About one million of those IP addresses belonged to computers, primarily based in the US and the UK, that attackers had infected with botnet software strains known as Boaxxe and Kovter. But at the scale employed by 3ve, not even that number of IP addresses was enough. And that’s where the BGP hijacking came in. The hijacking gave 3ve a nearly limitless supply of high-value IP addresses. Combined with the botnets, the ruse made it seem like millions of real people from some of the most affluent parts of the world were viewing the ads.
If you consider that this is likely just one instance of this type of behavior (used effectively to scam $29 million dollars of ad revenue from advertisers), you really start to wonder about the data that advertisers are actually collecting on "real people". We know they attempt to use data collection to make their ads more effective, but if the data they are working from is infected by behavior of bots and scams, how real is the data they are using? How much of their decisions of what, how, where to place ads isn't actually based on humans but on corrupted data?
Interestingly, I wonder how much of this could be used to actually influence real people by bot poisoned data? The methods used by the Internet Research Agency to influence the elections used bots to increase activity on particular forums and social networks, so could subtly increasing the response rates of particular ads cause those ads to be served up to particular groups more often, causing the increased exposure to those ads/messages to influence the target population in an unconscious way?
*puts tin-foil hat away*
posted by daq at 11:39 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
Members of 3ve (pronounced “eve”) used their large reservoir of trusted IP addresses to conceal a fraud that otherwise would have been easy for advertisers to detect. The scheme employed a thousand servers hosted inside data centers to impersonate real human beings who purportedly "viewed" ads that were hosted on bogus pages run by the scammers themselves—who then received a check from ad networks for these billions of fake ad impressions. Normally, a scam of this magnitude coming from such a small pool of server-hosted bots would have stuck out to defrauded advertisers. To camouflage the scam, 3ve operators funneled the servers’ fraudulent page requests through millions of compromised IP addresses.
About one million of those IP addresses belonged to computers, primarily based in the US and the UK, that attackers had infected with botnet software strains known as Boaxxe and Kovter. But at the scale employed by 3ve, not even that number of IP addresses was enough. And that’s where the BGP hijacking came in. The hijacking gave 3ve a nearly limitless supply of high-value IP addresses. Combined with the botnets, the ruse made it seem like millions of real people from some of the most affluent parts of the world were viewing the ads.
If you consider that this is likely just one instance of this type of behavior (used effectively to scam $29 million dollars of ad revenue from advertisers), you really start to wonder about the data that advertisers are actually collecting on "real people". We know they attempt to use data collection to make their ads more effective, but if the data they are working from is infected by behavior of bots and scams, how real is the data they are using? How much of their decisions of what, how, where to place ads isn't actually based on humans but on corrupted data?
Interestingly, I wonder how much of this could be used to actually influence real people by bot poisoned data? The methods used by the Internet Research Agency to influence the elections used bots to increase activity on particular forums and social networks, so could subtly increasing the response rates of particular ads cause those ads to be served up to particular groups more often, causing the increased exposure to those ads/messages to influence the target population in an unconscious way?
*puts tin-foil hat away*
posted by daq at 11:39 AM on December 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
Members of 3ve (pronounced “eve”)
I am crushed to learn they don't pronounce it "Threeve".
posted by solotoro at 12:39 PM on December 26, 2018 [17 favorites]
I am crushed to learn they don't pronounce it "Threeve".
posted by solotoro at 12:39 PM on December 26, 2018 [17 favorites]
This is the perfect example of how we are living in a crappy cyberpunk dystopia without any of the cool parts: The AIs took over but all they do is try to scam the other AIs for a quick buck.
The future is here and it is lame.
posted by iamnotangry at 2:11 PM on December 26, 2018 [18 favorites]
The future is here and it is lame.
posted by iamnotangry at 2:11 PM on December 26, 2018 [18 favorites]
Peter Watts, in Maelstrom, was on to something.
posted by Apocryphon at 2:38 PM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Apocryphon at 2:38 PM on December 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
"This is the perfect example of how we are living in a crappy cyberpunk dystopia without any of the cool parts"
No shit. We were promised limitless grids of blue neon out to the horizon and really great street drugs. We got Facebook and fentanyl. Fuck this timeline.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:55 PM on December 26, 2018 [35 favorites]
No shit. We were promised limitless grids of blue neon out to the horizon and really great street drugs. We got Facebook and fentanyl. Fuck this timeline.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 2:55 PM on December 26, 2018 [35 favorites]
This takes me back to the late 90s when the IT guys at the software company I worked at used spare computers to run copies of toolbars that showed ads and paid out part of what they were collecting in ad revenue. The business model of so many internet-related things has been dumb for so long, and sometimes it’s hard not to see it as various scales of grifts from top to botttom.
posted by jimw at 3:21 PM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by jimw at 3:21 PM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
(In it's defence I suspect this timeline has better music than the cyberpunk one. Hard to imagine Beyonce fitting into the Sprawl although Janelle Monae would slot straight in, albeit with a smile chilly enough to liquify air)
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:27 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:27 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm old enough to remember when nerds considered Doubleclick evil and skeezy for tracking people around the web with "web bugs."
Then Google bought them. :\
posted by edheil at 4:24 PM on December 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
Then Google bought them. :\
posted by edheil at 4:24 PM on December 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
If it's any consolation, I still think it's evil and skeezy and I've done my best to block it on all my computers. But then, I'm obviously still a nerd.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:03 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:03 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
So yeah, give me Liberty and in return, I promise to pay my taxes.
Oh I see, you're just choosing to define terms such that your fundamental belief doesn't count. Got it.
posted by PMdixon at 8:08 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
Oh I see, you're just choosing to define terms such that your fundamental belief doesn't count. Got it.
posted by PMdixon at 8:08 PM on December 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
*puts tin-foil hat away*
If you're not using it, could I borrow it?
*hand reaches out of Faraday cage*
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:31 PM on December 26, 2018
If you're not using it, could I borrow it?
*hand reaches out of Faraday cage*
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:31 PM on December 26, 2018
« Older Vox Populi, Vox Gritty | On Leftovers Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:43 AM on December 26, 2018 [13 favorites]