New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic::undefined

  • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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    11 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.

    • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
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      11 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

      • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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        11 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.

        • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          “Father, what is my purpose?”

          “You clip coupons.”

          “… Oh my god…”

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          11 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!

      • JDubbleu@programming.dev
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        11 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.