Comment on New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic

arandomthought@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• JDubbleu@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I really hate the phrase “bots” because it gives the appearance that they’re all useless and malicious. I guarantee you they lumped in the following extremely valid uses of “bots”:

  • Automated personal scripts that many programmers use, these are technically bots. Hell, I use a “bot” to auto-clip digital Safeway coupons
  • Moderation bots on sites like Lemmy/Reddit
  • Archive efforts

  Are AI chatbots bots? If they use a loose enough definition all this means is humans utilize fuck tons of automation over the Internet, both programmers and not.

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  • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Tech journalism is fucking garbage. Its always trying to tell me what to think rather than present legit unbiased information. It seems to get worse every year as if these journalist have a hate on for the tech they write about

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  • Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why do you think that such bots cause a relevant amount of traffic?

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    • JDubbleu@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Because they’re used absolutely everywhere, and often back large portions of Internet infrastructure. I’m a backend developer and we have thousands of “bots” running at any given time to keep our systems going. They generate traffic equivalent to thousands of people and are maintained by a 3 person dev team. This is for a relatively small company. When I was at AWS the scale was much more unfathomable.

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  • Riccosuave@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I use a “bot” to auto-clip digital Safeway coupons

    How?

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    • Decoy321@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They go, “hey bot, would you please clip me some Safeway coupons?”

      Then the bot goes and gets their little bot scissors and their bot newspaper, then clips up some coupons and hands them to OP.

      It’s a pretty endearing sight.

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      • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        “Father, what is my purpose?”

        “You clip coupons.”

        “… Oh my god…”

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      • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Then the bot goes and gets their little bot scissors

        But digitally.

        and their bot newspaper,

        But digitally.

        then clips up some coupons

        But digitally.

        and hands them to OP.

        But digitally.

        They said we’d all be living in a VR world by now back in the 90s!

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    • JDubbleu@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      TamperMonkey (I’ve been told to use ViolentMonkey instead as TamperMonkey isn’t open source) and the script here. Then you can run a script to periodically log into your account in a headless browser and click the button. Unfortunately there’s no coupon API so this is the best solution I could think of.

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      • Riccosuave@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Thank you for giving the first real answer. As funny as the others were, I was in fact looking for a legitimate understanding of how to do this 🙃

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  • jaybone@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I use a bot to convert source code into executable binaries.

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  • arandomthought@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s a very good point, thanks!

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• fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Not really, as with many others the headline is sensationalist. It’s missing the “… on login page attempts for sites that pay for and or use bot protection services.”

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  • arandomthought@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s very good to know and makes the situation a lot less bleak. Thank you for the additional context!

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    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      NP, this article was also posted by a bot, so… You know.

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