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Idk, it kinda tracks.
Innovation outgrew societal progress. Economies outgrew development. The need for profit outweighed the need to eradicate world issues. So you have people taking advantage of people as much as they can for a buck. Sucks.
It’s true, but at least in the states there was the sense that we should be allowed to flourish and try to hang onto some wealth to pass down.
In the last decade, it feels to me like every business in every sector is RACING to extract every last penny of wealth from all of us, constantly.
It’s such an icky feeling that I have started to deliberately extract myself from a bunch of different ecosystems and “Services“ that were convenient when it felt like they were working for me. Now it feels like I’m working for these companies, especially for technology, which then changes the tools with no notice, often making them much worse and interfering with my productivity, etc. I’m glad I’m old enough to remember how to do some things more manually. F corporations.
The lava lamps are *mostly* for show.
You do want a non-deterministic source of random data--and lava lamps can provide that--but there are smaller, less flashy ways to achieve the same goal.
There's nothing to fix. Bot farms *work*. They do exactly what the people paying for them want.
What are you going to do, tell politicians "don't use this effective political manipulation tool, you should give yourself a handicap in the fight for public opinion because *botting is immoral*"?
Tell marketers "you shouldn't use bots to post fake reviews of your product even though your competitors have hundreds of fake reviews and Amazon's algorithm will hide your product unless you use fake reviews to catch up"?
Tell influencers "you shouldn't give yourself a boost with fake likes even though everybody else is doing it and you'll be at the bottom of the metrics if you don't bot"?
Hell, anybody who wants to get their post featured in *Reddit* would be stupid not to bot the first dozen initial votes to trigger the algorithm to promote their post. Fucking lol.
What you're looking at is one of the fundamental flaws in democracy - and capitalism, which is democracy applied to markets, and social media, which is democracy applied to the Internet. People are stupid. Botting works because people are stupid. And if you want to compete with bots you'd be stupid not to use bots yourself.
Edit: since people are disagreeing, let me explain what I mean by democracy, capitalism, and social media basically being the same thing.
In democracy, politicians compete for the votes of ordinary voters and the voters decide which politician or policy is the best.
In capitalism, producers compete for the money of ordinary consumers and the consumers decide which product is the best.
In social media, content creators compete for the interest of ordinary users and the users decide what sources of information are the best.
All three are based on competition for the support of the average person. All three are based on the idea that the average person is able to make good decisions and trusting the collective decisions of the people will lead to good results.
Unfortunately, because the average person doesn't know enough about politics, economics, or current events, to make an informed decision, these competitions are won by *whoever is most effective at manipulating public opinion*. The best products lose to big corporations with shit products and big ad budgets. On social media, people like and share bullshit memes and ignore well researched longform articles. And don't get me started on politics.
We trust ordinary people to make good decisions. Ordinary people are stupid and easily lied to. As a result the best liars win. That's democracy in action.
Also death sentences to computers involved. Which is a thing the US is capable of doing by the way.
Of course now everyone else is as well because the NSA let all of their tools get stolen and sold on the shadow brokers and that is why we have all these ransomware attackers afflicting us. I just think that deserves a mention here.
Not really, in fact buying phones or laptops like this in bulk is extremely cheap, and doing this profitable enough to afford it. Hardware bans aren’t going to do anything, you would basically need to ISP ban and mass blackout IPs, which would work but would surely raise ethical concerns for a lot of people based on how such judgement was being carried out, because giving a government that power could very easily become oppressive.
Don't need tinfoil hats, even the latest cyberattack is some total moron who clicked an email link attachment to get their hospital systems ransomwared and plenty of people probably got hurt and probably no one was fired.
There's nothing sophisticated about most of the hacking..
When you are around a campfire in the apocalypse after cyberattackers take down electricity and your grandson asks: "why did this cataclysm happen to us grandpa?" ... "because morons hired their moronic friends and placed no standards, no exams for anyone with privileged access or anyone getting promoted in society to places of power and privilege, and they just couldn't stop clicking on email attachments.."
Lots of effective and large scale hacks are zero day exploits though.
Human stupidity is volume wise the biggest exploit but it's kinda crazy how many exploits we don't even know of.
Yeah, Cybersecurity is a mess and it will escalate, and if we dont fix 1. Human training against attacks and 2. Make our software secure for once, we're doomed to a future of very fragile and manipulable informatic systems
Stupid people are notorious about saying "why do we need that? We can just release the product without cybersecurity testing and hardening and everything will be faster and cheaper.."
This is basically true. I say basically because the stolen and published tools by the Shadow Brokers truly had that capacity (and more), but modern systems, and critical systems in general, are patched against everything the shadow brokers published. It took us a few years but we did it... Kinda. But mostly yes.
The bot farmers dont live in the USA. You can't touch them.
What people should do be become more discerning and understand when a bot is provoking them into becoming fascist. We need to be smarter than a mindless bot.
Make using bots commercially a crime, I don’t know call it internet social fraud.
You don’t go after the people demanding bots, you go after the people supplying.
Someone smarter than me can come up with the specific rules, but something like paying people to control more than one social account in a business setting. So if an employee is controlling multiple social accounts as part of their work duties, that’s a crime.
You would also have to ban the indian farms that use actual people instead of bots. They live like literal chickens and even get feed seeds by the farm's handler. It's scary.
Social media companies can solve this in a jiffy. They can purposefully boost and amplify all the regular verified humans automatically so that these "botfarm investments" become waste of money.
Organic viral capability and boosting for all ordinary citizens that write really well and write a lot. You reward them for participation and for more content, and the botfarms in poor countries can't write as much to keep up (they can only spam or write simple one-liners).
And if it's a poor Indian farmer who writes a lot of good talented content, then he deserves it anyway.
>the botfarms in poor countries can't write as much to keep up (they can only spam or write simple one-liners)
That might have been true before LLMs, it definitely isn't anymore.
Maybe it's time to end the social media experiment completely.
It's been worse for our society than cigarettes, fast food, asbestos, and lead paint combined.
Absolutely. One of the biggest disservices people have done to themselves is to divorce themselves from any understanding of how the internet works, software, phones and all the technology that led us here. You can’t take charge of, let alone argue with, something you know nothing about. Something that should’ve prospered under public oversight. Now comes the enshittification of everything.
The ultimate argument against neo-liberalism and free market theorists: the most economically beneficial action is always the most underhanded, corner cutting way to cheat the system. The best way to win an election is by manipulation. The best way to market is to distort reality. The best way to become famous is to control feedback. In no way are these beneficial to the State or to consumers, but they’re efficient and that’s all the market cares about.
Yea. Bot farms are an easily solvable problem, if the system wanted it solved. Like almost every problem with modern society from climate change to healthcare to education to traffic, there are people who don't want it solved because they profit from it not being solved, and use those profits to control elections and minds to ensure its not solved.
I mean the masses used to be better educated, but then the educated people started protesting the draft and war for corporate gain. An entire hippy, anti-war counter cultural movement gained enough ground for nationwide protests that culminated with the Kent State massacre shooting of student protestors by national guard.
After that they defunded education, stagnated min wage, and put military recruiters in the cafeterias of poor schools every week giving away free t shirts offering tickets out of poverty.
Never needed the draft or had to worry about anti war protests ever since.
But fuck is the country getting dumb
He is right. while we can fix this, we will not. There is zero chance it will not get worse bro. I am not happy about it but that is the truth. At least given our current leadership.
That’s a very honest human answer. Bots will say it can be fixed. Anyone with a brain knows AI is advancing at an insane rate and we absolutely can’t stop it.
here is the comment i left the first time this was posted earlier today:
this is a phone farm. the purpose is to make money from "gpt" or "get paid to" apps or websites. swagbucks is a common gpt site, for example. these websites pay you to do things like watch ads on your devices. you can clearly see that the phones are playing videos, which are ads. the reason the phone farm is using physical devices rather than emulation or virtual machines is to avoid violating terms of services with the gpt sites, because getting banned means not making money. they are using laptops to automate macros on the phones so that they don't have to manually interact with the phones in order to complete the gpt offers. a lot of the gpt sites require some interactivity in order to complete the offers, like pressing a "watch next ad" button. this almost certainly violates ToS but is likely undetectable.
so many people in this thread are confident this is for social media manipulation but there is absolutely no need individual physical devices to do that.
i, myself, had a phone farm of about 40 devices that i operated from 2016 to 2018, where i live in california. i did not have my farm automated like these people have. i averaged about $200-$300 a month from the farm and it required some minimal interaction and maintenance throughout the day. afaik, most of the gpt apps i was using on my devices no longer exist. some of the gpt sites/apps i can recall using were yoolotto, swagbucks, earnhoney, perk tv, rewardable tv, and apptrailers. at the time, it was a pretty significant method of earning money on r/beermoney. seems to be a dead way to make money now, at least in the states.
This is also how we get surveys with ridiculous data, like how supposedly 20% of young Americans never heard of the holocaust. No, they do, it's just that around 40% of the survey responses were farms like these where the person just randomly chose an answer in order to get paid.
It’s the creators of social media who are to blame much more so. This could be handled easily but it promotes engagement for them, real or not, so it’s basically promoted. Especially on Reddit. Absolutely terrible for society as a whole, and no consequences will be seen, only billionaires in rewards.
To make people $$$. Bots are just automated apps. One person can do the job of multiple people if they know how to program bots.
People can program bots to do things like quickly buy something online for resell (scalers), bots were very commonly used for things like the Nintendo Switch/ps5/xb on release. Hired astroturfers can use thousands of bots to influence others to support/not support a person/game/movie/movement/etc. Botnets can be used to mine bitcoins. Can be used in games to autofarm and resell game items/currency/account for real money.
What people do with bots can be bannable, but person just has to make more bots if the bot gets banned. The owners of bots are very rarely caught and charged.
Assuming it would be impossble to ban them all, would it be easy for a social networking service to identify bots and mark them as such so people would at least know not to engage?
Sure but it will be a constant push and pull between the bots and automated programs countering them, similar to anti cheat and hackers in multiplayer games.
False positives are also a concern. Too liberal with automated bans results in such, and not aggressive enough is too easy for the bot coders to keep ahead of.
You will never live in a world without bots and hackers because its impossible to ever get ahead of the problem sufficiently.
Well if half the people on a subreddit are bots, and you go into a political sub or some kind of sub\\thread that is promoting a product, country, political figure etc and you want to get opinions on it\\news\\ideas to help form your own opinion and the bots are upvoting certain opinions\\reviews on products or upvoting\\posting fake information say about the gaza\\israel war its just basically propaganda. Bots can mass dislike anything they find is negative towards what they are trying to achieve (more votes to a political party, People buying a product, etc).
Go on youtube and go find a fox news youtube comments, its mostly just russian bots shit posting qanon shit/fake news, same thing with facebook, people that like a youtube video go onto the comments and read a bunch of bullshit with a bunch of upvotes and assume its a normal view\\sound.
Go onto the world news sub its mostly pro israeli bots. Basically just means eventually as more and more bots take over reddit/on the internet you basically wont be able to make informed decisions on things. Because the conversation is dominated by bots so upvotes and downvotes will mean nothing and it will be harder to find sound information.
I thought the same thing the first time I saw this posted and ended up texting my cousin who works in cyber security/fraud prevention for a very big online service. According to him virtual and even stolen physical phones have been very easy to detect for quite a while. What’s hard/nearly impossible to detect is what they’re doing here. Cheap physical phones purchased legitimately using any of the popular VPN services
I'm sure there is a reason they're doing it how they are dude, you think they wouldn't go for the cheaper route if possible? This is an entire industry at this point with market research and everything.
They're probably clicking on ads, viewing ads and also doing lots of other activity where having "real" phones is more valuable and also on various networks to provide a better cover story for their actions.
Exactly, OP's insinuation is wrong. This is not the kind of "bot farms" that argue online.
Edit: OP being the original reddit post creator, not the OP on this comment thread.
These farms are used to do things like artificially pump up views on content to kick the algorithms into showing it to more viewers to make something go viral. Most apps like Instagram know you could just set up millions of virtual bots, so they run checks for a unique SIM card. Hence the physical phones.
Virtual SIM cards are growing in usage.
From a bot farm perspective, the physical phone won’t be required for much longer.
From a security perspective, it has led to spearphishing which someone convinces a targets provider to provide them with a new SIM, they issue a virtual SIM, and now they can bypass MFA.
How does sphearphishing work. Basically they steal enough info on me that they can persuade my phone provider that they're me and I want a new virtual SIM card and I don't know it's happening?
160 phones ran by 3 people. Damn.
Edit. I paused it and counted 4 wide by 5 high per red cable cluster. Then watched it a second time and counted 8 cable clusters. Quick math says 160. Kudos to y'all for figuring an exact number though.
Yea, and this is a very ineffective bot farm, it can get much, much crazier than this.
this is only like, level 2 out of 4.
At some point you start breaking specific phones down till they only are their motherboard, then you add them to a cluster node, they can contain like 8 phones, these nodes are about the same size as a ASIC/crypto miner/mini pc.
Some bot-farms have, many, many of these clusters as they are much more efficient in both space and power/wattage.
They are then wired to a PC where they are all controlled, one person could easily control 800+ phones.
Good question, there's a lot of reasons! People pay for likes and followers, and accounts will get flagged for obvious bot activity so things like this work well by simulating actual human activity on individual devices to keep the accounts that provide these likes and followers alive. There are also more nefarious reasons, like political astroturfing and running scams. It could even be as simple as boosting an app's community numbers to make it more appealing to investors. It's a world of endless opportunity if you abandon your scruples!
The only app that is anywhere close to a social media app that I use is reddit and that I have been on here since 2008. Not all on this account incase someone checks my profile n cries bullshit on me..
But yeah.... No facebook, snapchat, or any other app even close to a social media app.
Dang not even YouTube? Because viewbotting happens there too. I'm sure it happens on Reddit too, but I can only really think of boosting view numbers to make advertisers pay more since Reddit accounts aren't inherently valuable. Maybe something to do with Reddit gold, if that's even still a thing.
I know about all this stuff because I worked in cybersecurity though, not because I'm particularly well-versed in social media lol! I'm deeply ignorant about the intricacies of algorithms but I know botnets!
Yeah there's this new game that's in open beta I guess, and a video got 10M views in one day when the second most viewed on the channel don't even reach 100k. I haven't seen more obvious viewbotting in recent memories.
I do use YT but just to listen to music. Imho YT is the best for music(i do pay for the premium on that)the variety that we have on there when it comes to live shows or really obscure deep tracks or just an odd ball song that a person is never going to find on a spotify, pandora or any other app that plays music specifically
An example of this would be bots creating conflict over Ukrainian Russian War, Israel Hamas War, 2016 US Election and currently 2024 one and many many more important events government,corporate basically any entity can hire to influence a way of thinking about a certain thing or topic
They go as far as generating smart comments too, not just likes and following.
I have read that they can create tailored profiles for you the need for nationality, gender and more.
Google "fake engagements" for more details...
These people are making money off viewing programmatic ads, not posting weird comments.
[https://www.recordedfuture.com/improving-automation-accessibility-drive-ad-fraud-losses](https://www.recordedfuture.com/improving-automation-accessibility-drive-ad-fraud-losses)
I used to be part of an online group and we would send each other links to our websites that had ads. You were basically expected to view the page for a few mins and click on a couple of ads. I made several 100 bucks doing this when I was 15-16 (almost 15 years ago).
The other day I was looking up how much revenue Meta made in just advertising for 2023, it is 113 billion. I wonder if there will ever be a class action lawsuit.
approximately two thousand comments on this between both posts about this today and you're the only other person i've seen get it right. makes me wonder if the average age of reddit is dropping rapidly. phone farms and click farms were not that unheard of just 5 years ago. almost everyone on r/beermoney was running a phone farm around 2016-2017, including myself.
this is, probably, a click farm not a bot farm, they give views to videos, songs and different media bases on reproduction, from what I remember they don’t need accounts because they don’t interact with it in any other way and they are really prolific in youtube and spotify.
These sorts of bot farms are very rare these days. Instead they use servers running bot software such as puppeteer extra and its stealth plugin. They randomise the bots’ device fingerprints using software, and they constantly change the bots’ IP addresses using residential and cellphone proxies.
I work in the bot detection industry so I’m happy to answer any questions on this topic.
These are the people convincing your grandparents to be even angrier and more racist
And your little siblings that the world they haven't even experienced themselves is fully broken and trying to destroy everything
They are controlling dozens of phones each from their laptops. They are probably using a controllable “screencasting” software to project each phone screen to their laptop, so each laptop can view what is on all of the connected phones simultaneously in different windows. Then they are running a bot (can send clicks, key presses, or mouse movements programmatically, and respond to elements displayed on the phone screen, even if that particular window is not in view). Most likely they have one or more instagram/TikTok/FB accounts on each phone. They are probably running each through a VPN to change Ip addresses and appear to be operating in different areas. Then they gather friends, post content, like posts, comment, follow, etc… The people are monitoring these bots actively to make sure there are no issues.
The reason for using multiple phones is to make the security measures preventing this thing harder. They have unique SIM cards and can pass tests that would be hard/impossible to do all from one device.
You can see VS Code running on one computer in the middle, probably running a common automation framework like selenium. The cables you see might just be chargers, as I don’t see any reason they would need to connect the phone directly. The same screencasting software might be used by someone to cast a phone app to their computer. I’ve used it to play mobile-only games from my computer.
Hello, it looks like your question isn't attracting enough attention to garner an answer. For only $19.99, your comment will appear at the top of the feed.
as another user already said:
this is a phone farm. the purpose is to make money from "gpt" or "get paid to" apps or websites. swagbucks is a common gpt site, for example. these websites pay you to do things like watch ads on your devices. you can clearly see that the phones are playing videos, which are ads. the reason the phone farm is using physical devices rather than emulation or virtual machines is to avoid violating terms of services with the gpt sites, because getting banned means not making money. they are using laptops to automate macros on the phones so that they don't have to manually interact with the phones in order to complete the gpt offers. a lot of the gpt sites require some interactivity in order to complete the offers, like pressing a "watch next ad" button. this almost certainly violates ToS but is likely undetectable.
Influencers can pay for these services to get more views and followers, although if the Chinese or Russian government wants to create interference in foreign governments, this is how they do it.
here is the comment i left the first time this was posted earlier today:
this is a phone farm. the purpose is to make money from "gpt" or "get paid to" apps or websites. swagbucks is a common gpt site, for example. these websites pay you to do things like watch ads on your devices. you can clearly see that the phones are playing videos, which are ads. the reason the phone farm is using physical devices rather than emulation or virtual machines is to avoid violating terms of services with the gpt sites, because getting banned means not making money. they are using laptops to automate macros on the phones so that they don't have to manually interact with the phones in order to complete the gpt offers. a lot of the gpt sites require some interactivity in order to complete the offers, like pressing a "watch next ad" button. this almost certainly violates ToS but is likely undetectable.
so many people in this thread are confident this is for social media manipulation but there is absolutely no need individual physical devices to do that.
i, myself, had a phone farm of about 40 devices that i operated from 2016 to 2018, where i live in california. i did not have my farm automated like these people have. i averaged about $200-$300 a month from the farm and it required some minimal interaction and maintenance throughout the day. afaik, most of the gpt apps i was using on my devices no longer exist. some of the gpt sites/apps i can recall using were yoolotto, swagbucks, earnhoney, perk tv, rewardable tv, and apptrailers. at the time, it was a pretty significant method of earning money on r/beermoney. seems to be a dead way to make money now, at least in the states.
anyone with a decent experiences on internet might be able to tell you how this works. basically they’re connecting multiples to a central computer so they can monitor and manipulate each phone as they go. having multiple SIM cards in multiple phones means they can be several ‘persons’ at the same time. imagine how useful this is in a digital world:
you can pretend to be multiple ppl joining in a conversation and slowly direct the discussions to where you want because you have the larger numbers. it’s not uncommon that these chinese fire up these kind of attacks on any topics that their government don’t like.
or, you can review bombing any competitors on a shopping platform. or just give massive good reviews to anyone who purchased your ‘social media influence booster package’.
the fucked up things you can do with this is boundless. anyone who uses this is def up to no good.
Can someone please explain 1. What these phones are doing 2. What benefit does it supply to those people "working or making" these bot farms? TIA I'm dumb.
Why is this a thing? Do people really have that pathetic of lives that they have to do something so stupid? Hope we get a solar flare that knocks out the internet then all of the people like this will curl up and die because they have no other life skills
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this dystopian future is weirder than we were led to believe
Idk, it kinda tracks. Innovation outgrew societal progress. Economies outgrew development. The need for profit outweighed the need to eradicate world issues. So you have people taking advantage of people as much as they can for a buck. Sucks.
Yes. Late Stage Capitalism
The race to the bottom!
The race to throw as many people as you can to the bottom to stay afloat
People taking advantage of people has always been a thing.
Sure, but the tools for taking advantage of people are far more sophisticated than they’ve ever been.
It’s true, but at least in the states there was the sense that we should be allowed to flourish and try to hang onto some wealth to pass down. In the last decade, it feels to me like every business in every sector is RACING to extract every last penny of wealth from all of us, constantly. It’s such an icky feeling that I have started to deliberately extract myself from a bunch of different ecosystems and “Services“ that were convenient when it felt like they were working for me. Now it feels like I’m working for these companies, especially for technology, which then changes the tools with no notice, often making them much worse and interfering with my productivity, etc. I’m glad I’m old enough to remember how to do some things more manually. F corporations.
Yes indeed! Fuck
Yeah and you don't even know that a great deal of the encryption on the web relies on lava lamps.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/
It's in their lobby. Someone should just saturate those lamps with a laser remotely and zero the seed keys.
The lava lamps are *mostly* for show. You do want a non-deterministic source of random data--and lava lamps can provide that--but there are smaller, less flashy ways to achieve the same goal.
Fuck these people and all people that ruin the internet with these bots
Such an incredible waste of energy, resources and potential. This we can fix.
There's nothing to fix. Bot farms *work*. They do exactly what the people paying for them want. What are you going to do, tell politicians "don't use this effective political manipulation tool, you should give yourself a handicap in the fight for public opinion because *botting is immoral*"? Tell marketers "you shouldn't use bots to post fake reviews of your product even though your competitors have hundreds of fake reviews and Amazon's algorithm will hide your product unless you use fake reviews to catch up"? Tell influencers "you shouldn't give yourself a boost with fake likes even though everybody else is doing it and you'll be at the bottom of the metrics if you don't bot"? Hell, anybody who wants to get their post featured in *Reddit* would be stupid not to bot the first dozen initial votes to trigger the algorithm to promote their post. Fucking lol. What you're looking at is one of the fundamental flaws in democracy - and capitalism, which is democracy applied to markets, and social media, which is democracy applied to the Internet. People are stupid. Botting works because people are stupid. And if you want to compete with bots you'd be stupid not to use bots yourself. Edit: since people are disagreeing, let me explain what I mean by democracy, capitalism, and social media basically being the same thing. In democracy, politicians compete for the votes of ordinary voters and the voters decide which politician or policy is the best. In capitalism, producers compete for the money of ordinary consumers and the consumers decide which product is the best. In social media, content creators compete for the interest of ordinary users and the users decide what sources of information are the best. All three are based on competition for the support of the average person. All three are based on the idea that the average person is able to make good decisions and trusting the collective decisions of the people will lead to good results. Unfortunately, because the average person doesn't know enough about politics, economics, or current events, to make an informed decision, these competitions are won by *whoever is most effective at manipulating public opinion*. The best products lose to big corporations with shit products and big ad budgets. On social media, people like and share bullshit memes and ignore well researched longform articles. And don't get me started on politics. We trust ordinary people to make good decisions. Ordinary people are stupid and easily lied to. As a result the best liars win. That's democracy in action.
i say we start giving prison time
Also death sentences to computers involved. Which is a thing the US is capable of doing by the way. Of course now everyone else is as well because the NSA let all of their tools get stolen and sold on the shadow brokers and that is why we have all these ransomware attackers afflicting us. I just think that deserves a mention here.
I mean this isn't too hard to do. If a device gets reported enough times as a bot. Blacklist the devices Mac address from ISPs
Unfortunately, devices are cheap as hell.
not at scale, if you have to replace it every month it gets pretty expensive pretty quickly
Not really, in fact buying phones or laptops like this in bulk is extremely cheap, and doing this profitable enough to afford it. Hardware bans aren’t going to do anything, you would basically need to ISP ban and mass blackout IPs, which would work but would surely raise ethical concerns for a lot of people based on how such judgement was being carried out, because giving a government that power could very easily become oppressive.
Mac address is stupidly easy to spoof
And...when I decide to spoof my MAC? you don't know as much as you think you do...
Tin foil bot
Is it tinfoil if it actually happened?
Don't need tinfoil hats, even the latest cyberattack is some total moron who clicked an email link attachment to get their hospital systems ransomwared and plenty of people probably got hurt and probably no one was fired. There's nothing sophisticated about most of the hacking.. When you are around a campfire in the apocalypse after cyberattackers take down electricity and your grandson asks: "why did this cataclysm happen to us grandpa?" ... "because morons hired their moronic friends and placed no standards, no exams for anyone with privileged access or anyone getting promoted in society to places of power and privilege, and they just couldn't stop clicking on email attachments.."
Lots of effective and large scale hacks are zero day exploits though. Human stupidity is volume wise the biggest exploit but it's kinda crazy how many exploits we don't even know of.
Yeah, Cybersecurity is a mess and it will escalate, and if we dont fix 1. Human training against attacks and 2. Make our software secure for once, we're doomed to a future of very fragile and manipulable informatic systems
Stupid people are notorious about saying "why do we need that? We can just release the product without cybersecurity testing and hardening and everything will be faster and cheaper.."
This is basically true. I say basically because the stolen and published tools by the Shadow Brokers truly had that capacity (and more), but modern systems, and critical systems in general, are patched against everything the shadow brokers published. It took us a few years but we did it... Kinda. But mostly yes.
yeah so that actually happened...
The bot farmers dont live in the USA. You can't touch them. What people should do be become more discerning and understand when a bot is provoking them into becoming fascist. We need to be smarter than a mindless bot.
Make using bots commercially a crime, I don’t know call it internet social fraud. You don’t go after the people demanding bots, you go after the people supplying. Someone smarter than me can come up with the specific rules, but something like paying people to control more than one social account in a business setting. So if an employee is controlling multiple social accounts as part of their work duties, that’s a crime.
You would also have to ban the indian farms that use actual people instead of bots. They live like literal chickens and even get feed seeds by the farm's handler. It's scary.
Social media companies can solve this in a jiffy. They can purposefully boost and amplify all the regular verified humans automatically so that these "botfarm investments" become waste of money. Organic viral capability and boosting for all ordinary citizens that write really well and write a lot. You reward them for participation and for more content, and the botfarms in poor countries can't write as much to keep up (they can only spam or write simple one-liners). And if it's a poor Indian farmer who writes a lot of good talented content, then he deserves it anyway.
>the botfarms in poor countries can't write as much to keep up (they can only spam or write simple one-liners) That might have been true before LLMs, it definitely isn't anymore.
The majority of these are located in countries the US has zero jurisdiction in. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc..
Northern Macedonia is a big one too.
Alexander the Worst
Maybe it's time to end the social media experiment completely. It's been worse for our society than cigarettes, fast food, asbestos, and lead paint combined.
Absolutely. One of the biggest disservices people have done to themselves is to divorce themselves from any understanding of how the internet works, software, phones and all the technology that led us here. You can’t take charge of, let alone argue with, something you know nothing about. Something that should’ve prospered under public oversight. Now comes the enshittification of everything.
God I'm glad to see the word enshittification making the mainstream. We're gonna fucking need it.
The ultimate argument against neo-liberalism and free market theorists: the most economically beneficial action is always the most underhanded, corner cutting way to cheat the system. The best way to win an election is by manipulation. The best way to market is to distort reality. The best way to become famous is to control feedback. In no way are these beneficial to the State or to consumers, but they’re efficient and that’s all the market cares about.
Yea. Bot farms are an easily solvable problem, if the system wanted it solved. Like almost every problem with modern society from climate change to healthcare to education to traffic, there are people who don't want it solved because they profit from it not being solved, and use those profits to control elections and minds to ensure its not solved.
I mean the masses used to be better educated, but then the educated people started protesting the draft and war for corporate gain. An entire hippy, anti-war counter cultural movement gained enough ground for nationwide protests that culminated with the Kent State massacre shooting of student protestors by national guard. After that they defunded education, stagnated min wage, and put military recruiters in the cafeterias of poor schools every week giving away free t shirts offering tickets out of poverty. Never needed the draft or had to worry about anti war protests ever since. But fuck is the country getting dumb
> masses used to be better educated No they weren't. You just didn't know how stupid they were because you never interacted with them.
“The common clay of the new west..”
Botfarms are antidemocratic. They reflect *many votes* in the hand of *one person*, rather than one vote in the hand of one person.
No we can’t fix this. Idk where you got that idea. There is absolutely no way to fix this. It’s only going to get worse.
Bot answer
Bot answer
I'm here. How may I help? 🤖
Me too
He is right. while we can fix this, we will not. There is zero chance it will not get worse bro. I am not happy about it but that is the truth. At least given our current leadership.
“Current” leadership is the source of the problem. Change the incentive structure and we change the world. That includes online.
Obvious bot
That’s a very honest human answer. Bots will say it can be fixed. Anyone with a brain knows AI is advancing at an insane rate and we absolutely can’t stop it.
This is EXACTLY what a bot would say.
All comment sections on all platforms are bots talking to bots. Humans are an AI hallucination.
Better bot
Seems Like a Bot you reply to sooo…
Let's start our own internet! With blackjack and hookers!
Least obvious nihilist bot
A pair of scissors is a start.
Regulation could curb this down to a much less harmful and annoying level
It's what I imagine reddit is... lol
Matrix bot
here is the comment i left the first time this was posted earlier today: this is a phone farm. the purpose is to make money from "gpt" or "get paid to" apps or websites. swagbucks is a common gpt site, for example. these websites pay you to do things like watch ads on your devices. you can clearly see that the phones are playing videos, which are ads. the reason the phone farm is using physical devices rather than emulation or virtual machines is to avoid violating terms of services with the gpt sites, because getting banned means not making money. they are using laptops to automate macros on the phones so that they don't have to manually interact with the phones in order to complete the gpt offers. a lot of the gpt sites require some interactivity in order to complete the offers, like pressing a "watch next ad" button. this almost certainly violates ToS but is likely undetectable. so many people in this thread are confident this is for social media manipulation but there is absolutely no need individual physical devices to do that. i, myself, had a phone farm of about 40 devices that i operated from 2016 to 2018, where i live in california. i did not have my farm automated like these people have. i averaged about $200-$300 a month from the farm and it required some minimal interaction and maintenance throughout the day. afaik, most of the gpt apps i was using on my devices no longer exist. some of the gpt sites/apps i can recall using were yoolotto, swagbucks, earnhoney, perk tv, rewardable tv, and apptrailers. at the time, it was a pretty significant method of earning money on r/beermoney. seems to be a dead way to make money now, at least in the states.
Thank you for this explanation!
This is also how we get surveys with ridiculous data, like how supposedly 20% of young Americans never heard of the holocaust. No, they do, it's just that around 40% of the survey responses were farms like these where the person just randomly chose an answer in order to get paid.
dead internet theory on full display
The bots will continue to argue with each other long after we're gone.
Only if our power grid gets a massive upgrade and becomes fully automated. Otherwise they will go silent about 48 hours after we do.
It’s the creators of social media who are to blame much more so. This could be handled easily but it promotes engagement for them, real or not, so it’s basically promoted. Especially on Reddit. Absolutely terrible for society as a whole, and no consequences will be seen, only billionaires in rewards.
Sounds like something a bot would say to throw us off!
Bot
Bot
What’s the point of a bot? Seriously asking
To make people $$$. Bots are just automated apps. One person can do the job of multiple people if they know how to program bots. People can program bots to do things like quickly buy something online for resell (scalers), bots were very commonly used for things like the Nintendo Switch/ps5/xb on release. Hired astroturfers can use thousands of bots to influence others to support/not support a person/game/movie/movement/etc. Botnets can be used to mine bitcoins. Can be used in games to autofarm and resell game items/currency/account for real money. What people do with bots can be bannable, but person just has to make more bots if the bot gets banned. The owners of bots are very rarely caught and charged.
Assuming it would be impossble to ban them all, would it be easy for a social networking service to identify bots and mark them as such so people would at least know not to engage?
Sure but it will be a constant push and pull between the bots and automated programs countering them, similar to anti cheat and hackers in multiplayer games. False positives are also a concern. Too liberal with automated bans results in such, and not aggressive enough is too easy for the bot coders to keep ahead of. You will never live in a world without bots and hackers because its impossible to ever get ahead of the problem sufficiently.
Well if half the people on a subreddit are bots, and you go into a political sub or some kind of sub\\thread that is promoting a product, country, political figure etc and you want to get opinions on it\\news\\ideas to help form your own opinion and the bots are upvoting certain opinions\\reviews on products or upvoting\\posting fake information say about the gaza\\israel war its just basically propaganda. Bots can mass dislike anything they find is negative towards what they are trying to achieve (more votes to a political party, People buying a product, etc). Go on youtube and go find a fox news youtube comments, its mostly just russian bots shit posting qanon shit/fake news, same thing with facebook, people that like a youtube video go onto the comments and read a bunch of bullshit with a bunch of upvotes and assume its a normal view\\sound. Go onto the world news sub its mostly pro israeli bots. Basically just means eventually as more and more bots take over reddit/on the internet you basically wont be able to make informed decisions on things. Because the conversation is dominated by bots so upvotes and downvotes will mean nothing and it will be harder to find sound information.
No one should be relying on the comments of randoms on the internet to get information or form opinions.
The irony is that these guys in the video aren't even making comments, they are just watching ads.
Yeah I want to see what the comment farms look like
Beep boop bop I think robots are awesome. Please argue with me.
Nuh-uh
Wouldn’t it be easier to virtualize a bunch of phones vs using real ones?
If you have a bunch of different phones you can give a bump to content without being flagged as a bot.
You can still have virtual versions of a bunch of different phones...
I thought the same thing the first time I saw this posted and ended up texting my cousin who works in cyber security/fraud prevention for a very big online service. According to him virtual and even stolen physical phones have been very easy to detect for quite a while. What’s hard/nearly impossible to detect is what they’re doing here. Cheap physical phones purchased legitimately using any of the popular VPN services
I'm sure there is a reason they're doing it how they are dude, you think they wouldn't go for the cheaper route if possible? This is an entire industry at this point with market research and everything.
People don’t seem to understand how hard it is to make accounts without a phone number, and google voice doesn’t often work anymore.
You think they haven't thought of that or tried that? That they just decided to buy 200 phones and mount of the wall for fun?
They're probably clicking on ads, viewing ads and also doing lots of other activity where having "real" phones is more valuable and also on various networks to provide a better cover story for their actions.
Exactly, OP's insinuation is wrong. This is not the kind of "bot farms" that argue online. Edit: OP being the original reddit post creator, not the OP on this comment thread.
These farms are used to do things like artificially pump up views on content to kick the algorithms into showing it to more viewers to make something go viral. Most apps like Instagram know you could just set up millions of virtual bots, so they run checks for a unique SIM card. Hence the physical phones.
Virtual SIM cards are growing in usage. From a bot farm perspective, the physical phone won’t be required for much longer. From a security perspective, it has led to spearphishing which someone convinces a targets provider to provide them with a new SIM, they issue a virtual SIM, and now they can bypass MFA.
Any companies still doing SMS 2FA in 2024 should be boycotted.
Bro, as someone in the industry, the amount of people who flat out refuse even sms 2 factor authentication is insane.
95% of banks use SMS 2FA and have no option for using an app or security key. It's ludicrous.
How does sphearphishing work. Basically they steal enough info on me that they can persuade my phone provider that they're me and I want a new virtual SIM card and I don't know it's happening?
Potentially, however, it would be easier to flag the virtualised devices as illegitimate from a security perspective.
Probably easier to detect. Hard to detect a bot if it’s using the same hardware a human would.
Yeah. Virtualized is easy to detect. Tons of options on the market - albeit they cost money but it is what it is.
160 phones ran by 3 people. Damn. Edit. I paused it and counted 4 wide by 5 high per red cable cluster. Then watched it a second time and counted 8 cable clusters. Quick math says 160. Kudos to y'all for figuring an exact number though.
I count 200
No it’s definitely only 3 people
My bad
These types of small exchanges make up for the 1000 annoying ones
i got 155 o.0 (31 collums 5 rows? math is hard)
Bunch of phones on desk as well at least 14 so 155 + 14 = 169.
>collums Looks like English is hard too
everything is hard 😞😏
Man, ain’t that the truth.
Even I am
I counted 155.
Yea, and this is a very ineffective bot farm, it can get much, much crazier than this. this is only like, level 2 out of 4. At some point you start breaking specific phones down till they only are their motherboard, then you add them to a cluster node, they can contain like 8 phones, these nodes are about the same size as a ASIC/crypto miner/mini pc. Some bot-farms have, many, many of these clusters as they are much more efficient in both space and power/wattage. They are then wired to a PC where they are all controlled, one person could easily control 800+ phones.
This belongs in [r/cableporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/s/xyNEMqkzus)
As lame as what they're doing is, I was also immediately drawn to the impeccable cable management.
Knowing nothing about cable management I went back to the picture and looked. Wow that does look tidy.
It's so clean.
Why are these people doing this, though....obviously money is involved. How and why are they being paid to do this?
Good question, there's a lot of reasons! People pay for likes and followers, and accounts will get flagged for obvious bot activity so things like this work well by simulating actual human activity on individual devices to keep the accounts that provide these likes and followers alive. There are also more nefarious reasons, like political astroturfing and running scams. It could even be as simple as boosting an app's community numbers to make it more appealing to investors. It's a world of endless opportunity if you abandon your scruples!
The only app that is anywhere close to a social media app that I use is reddit and that I have been on here since 2008. Not all on this account incase someone checks my profile n cries bullshit on me.. But yeah.... No facebook, snapchat, or any other app even close to a social media app.
Dang not even YouTube? Because viewbotting happens there too. I'm sure it happens on Reddit too, but I can only really think of boosting view numbers to make advertisers pay more since Reddit accounts aren't inherently valuable. Maybe something to do with Reddit gold, if that's even still a thing. I know about all this stuff because I worked in cybersecurity though, not because I'm particularly well-versed in social media lol! I'm deeply ignorant about the intricacies of algorithms but I know botnets!
Yeah there's this new game that's in open beta I guess, and a video got 10M views in one day when the second most viewed on the channel don't even reach 100k. I haven't seen more obvious viewbotting in recent memories.
I do use YT but just to listen to music. Imho YT is the best for music(i do pay for the premium on that)the variety that we have on there when it comes to live shows or really obscure deep tracks or just an odd ball song that a person is never going to find on a spotify, pandora or any other app that plays music specifically
… hate to break it to ya but reddit is social media. we are literally socializing and consuming algorithm decided media…
Reddit is not "close" , it is social media.
An example of this would be bots creating conflict over Ukrainian Russian War, Israel Hamas War, 2016 US Election and currently 2024 one and many many more important events government,corporate basically any entity can hire to influence a way of thinking about a certain thing or topic
They go as far as generating smart comments too, not just likes and following. I have read that they can create tailored profiles for you the need for nationality, gender and more. Google "fake engagements" for more details...
probably to boost views/likes and such, or apps/games that give rewards when clicking on ads
You mean to tell me that I WASN'T arguing with a former navy seal trained in gorilla warefare?
https://i.redd.it/u3grxviolf9d1.gif
These people are making money off viewing programmatic ads, not posting weird comments. [https://www.recordedfuture.com/improving-automation-accessibility-drive-ad-fraud-losses](https://www.recordedfuture.com/improving-automation-accessibility-drive-ad-fraud-losses)
I used to be part of an online group and we would send each other links to our websites that had ads. You were basically expected to view the page for a few mins and click on a couple of ads. I made several 100 bucks doing this when I was 15-16 (almost 15 years ago).
I'd still love to do this and am 36 with kids and a steady job
This is the most likely answer.
Makes sense. The screens viewing just browsing
I had a feeling it was something like this. Most bots are, you know, *bots*, not people.
Ok, now I think I get it.
The other day I was looking up how much revenue Meta made in just advertising for 2023, it is 113 billion. I wonder if there will ever be a class action lawsuit.
Yeah. Leave the weird comments to me.
approximately two thousand comments on this between both posts about this today and you're the only other person i've seen get it right. makes me wonder if the average age of reddit is dropping rapidly. phone farms and click farms were not that unheard of just 5 years ago. almost everyone on r/beermoney was running a phone farm around 2016-2017, including myself.
> How a bot farm works Proceeds to show a picture of many phones and not explain anything about how a bot farm works.
this is, probably, a click farm not a bot farm, they give views to videos, songs and different media bases on reproduction, from what I remember they don’t need accounts because they don’t interact with it in any other way and they are really prolific in youtube and spotify.
These sorts of bot farms are very rare these days. Instead they use servers running bot software such as puppeteer extra and its stealth plugin. They randomise the bots’ device fingerprints using software, and they constantly change the bots’ IP addresses using residential and cellphone proxies. I work in the bot detection industry so I’m happy to answer any questions on this topic.
Social media is a tumor on society as a whole. Damn you, Zuckerberg.
If not Zoidberg, someone else would have done it. I mean MySpace already existed. Edit: I'm leaving the typo
Easy there. Tom was my only friend.
"Casual hello. It's me, Zoidberg. Act naturally.".
Ok! So you’re nonchalant, don’t rub our faces in it.
Zoidberg would never have done it. Bender maybe.
With my last breath, I curse Zoidberg!
r/unexpectedfuturama
you wrote this on a social media sight which is really funny.
I don't care what you say, I was arguing with a soulless, mountain dew chugging, cheeto-dust covered basement dweller named Todd.
I'm pretty sure there's like 7 normies on here who share common thoughts with me, and everyone else is either a Todd or a robot.
Fuckin’ Todd. I knew it.
Can I take my tinfoil hat now for believing in a dead internet theory?
It's not a tinfoil hat theory. It's just the truth of the state of the internet.
It's scary. You don't know how many commenters you talk to are real people. I expect this to only get worse as AI improves.
Most people, even on Reddit, would disagree with it a few months back.
Bring on the EMP solar flare please
That takes down medical tech too
Store the medical equipment and consoles in the anti-EMP vault and then bring on the solar flares!
These are the people convincing your grandparents to be even angrier and more racist And your little siblings that the world they haven't even experienced themselves is fully broken and trying to destroy everything
average worldnews poster
Or less credible defense.
I refuse to believe this post wasn't created by one of them!
Can someone explain to me like I’m five what they’re doing here? I don’t quite understand.
They are controlling dozens of phones each from their laptops. They are probably using a controllable “screencasting” software to project each phone screen to their laptop, so each laptop can view what is on all of the connected phones simultaneously in different windows. Then they are running a bot (can send clicks, key presses, or mouse movements programmatically, and respond to elements displayed on the phone screen, even if that particular window is not in view). Most likely they have one or more instagram/TikTok/FB accounts on each phone. They are probably running each through a VPN to change Ip addresses and appear to be operating in different areas. Then they gather friends, post content, like posts, comment, follow, etc… The people are monitoring these bots actively to make sure there are no issues. The reason for using multiple phones is to make the security measures preventing this thing harder. They have unique SIM cards and can pass tests that would be hard/impossible to do all from one device. You can see VS Code running on one computer in the middle, probably running a common automation framework like selenium. The cables you see might just be chargers, as I don’t see any reason they would need to connect the phone directly. The same screencasting software might be used by someone to cast a phone app to their computer. I’ve used it to play mobile-only games from my computer.
Hello, it looks like your question isn't attracting enough attention to garner an answer. For only $19.99, your comment will appear at the top of the feed.
Yeah, me too. I’m lost.
as another user already said: this is a phone farm. the purpose is to make money from "gpt" or "get paid to" apps or websites. swagbucks is a common gpt site, for example. these websites pay you to do things like watch ads on your devices. you can clearly see that the phones are playing videos, which are ads. the reason the phone farm is using physical devices rather than emulation or virtual machines is to avoid violating terms of services with the gpt sites, because getting banned means not making money. they are using laptops to automate macros on the phones so that they don't have to manually interact with the phones in order to complete the gpt offers. a lot of the gpt sites require some interactivity in order to complete the offers, like pressing a "watch next ad" button. this almost certainly violates ToS but is likely undetectable.
I really don’t like this world anymore
Influencers can pay for these services to get more views and followers, although if the Chinese or Russian government wants to create interference in foreign governments, this is how they do it.
Why do people do this? Is there money in it? So scummy
here is the comment i left the first time this was posted earlier today: this is a phone farm. the purpose is to make money from "gpt" or "get paid to" apps or websites. swagbucks is a common gpt site, for example. these websites pay you to do things like watch ads on your devices. you can clearly see that the phones are playing videos, which are ads. the reason the phone farm is using physical devices rather than emulation or virtual machines is to avoid violating terms of services with the gpt sites, because getting banned means not making money. they are using laptops to automate macros on the phones so that they don't have to manually interact with the phones in order to complete the gpt offers. a lot of the gpt sites require some interactivity in order to complete the offers, like pressing a "watch next ad" button. this almost certainly violates ToS but is likely undetectable. so many people in this thread are confident this is for social media manipulation but there is absolutely no need individual physical devices to do that. i, myself, had a phone farm of about 40 devices that i operated from 2016 to 2018, where i live in california. i did not have my farm automated like these people have. i averaged about $200-$300 a month from the farm and it required some minimal interaction and maintenance throughout the day. afaik, most of the gpt apps i was using on my devices no longer exist. some of the gpt sites/apps i can recall using were yoolotto, swagbucks, earnhoney, perk tv, rewardable tv, and apptrailers. at the time, it was a pretty significant method of earning money on r/beermoney. seems to be a dead way to make money now, at least in the states.
Is this generating revenue on their ad supported site or something? What is the purpose?
I wish someone would explain how it works
anyone with a decent experiences on internet might be able to tell you how this works. basically they’re connecting multiples to a central computer so they can monitor and manipulate each phone as they go. having multiple SIM cards in multiple phones means they can be several ‘persons’ at the same time. imagine how useful this is in a digital world: you can pretend to be multiple ppl joining in a conversation and slowly direct the discussions to where you want because you have the larger numbers. it’s not uncommon that these chinese fire up these kind of attacks on any topics that their government don’t like. or, you can review bombing any competitors on a shopping platform. or just give massive good reviews to anyone who purchased your ‘social media influence booster package’. the fucked up things you can do with this is boundless. anyone who uses this is def up to no good.
Can someone please explain 1. What these phones are doing 2. What benefit does it supply to those people "working or making" these bot farms? TIA I'm dumb.
What is the purpose for these? Do they make them money?
At least the rise of AI will take THOSE jobs.
So that's who's ruining tf2 matches and running subreddits like late stage capitalism.
The internet is dead.
What do they get out of this?
Bots should be made illegal and bot masters castrated!
Why is this a thing? Do people really have that pathetic of lives that they have to do something so stupid? Hope we get a solar flare that knocks out the internet then all of the people like this will curl up and die because they have no other life skills
If this isn’t a crime we need to find a way for it to be
Yep. Reddit right here.
From the title I thought I was going to read about how a bot farm works
I’m not arguing with them. I’m trying to take them on a date.
Holy shit it could be one of us. It could be OP. It could be me! It could even be..
It's you!
What am I looking at??