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New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic
(interestingengineering.com)
The fact that this post is by a bot makes it sound so ironic
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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The headline stat is a misinterpretation of the study which was done by Arkose Labs which "provides businesses with lasting bot prevention and account security by sapping the financial motivations of cybercriminals."
That's pretty vague but skimming it sounds like they prevent automated account creation and takeover. The stat comes from the companies they have access to (who need bot protection enough to pay for it), and 76% of activity on the login/account creation was malicious. That makes a lot more sense. All the various hacks and credential leaks result in bots banging in stolen credentials on high value sites.
The headline stat is a misinterpretation of the study
and 76% of activity on the login/account creation was malicious.
Are you assuming though that that's 76%, once they've created an account, would do no fuether interaction with the Internet after that?
I'm not sure of the point that you're trying to make?
You think these bots are streaming movies and music? 73% of Internet traffic is not bots. It's all YouTube, Netflix, Insta, TikTok, Spotify, etc media consumption. 73% of login traffic may be bots, but it's a teeny drop of global traffic.
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Arkose does log-in protection for Roblox (and others but that's the one I'm familiar with) where the user has to do something like rotate a picture before logging in.
More evidence for the Dead Internet Theory
Not yet but soon it will be
Death by a thousand ~~cuts~~ bot/shill posts.
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"73% of web traffic" does not mean 73% of comments, posts, content, etc.
It amazes me when I spin up some random server on a cloud provider and it's immediately getting tons of traffic from bots searching for insecure ssh servers and default WordPress admin credentials and then like. If that's the short of stuff they're counting, I'd believe it. But yeah, it's not like all the commenters on this post are bots.
Yeah we had a presentation at work from AWS , they said expect all ports and protocols on any aws server you spin up to be scanned in less than 1min of any instance being created
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The web is like a shitty neighborhood now, with stalkers and unpleasant people coming up to you frequently to sell their shady stuff.
Still works for finding answers to technical questions but if I wasn't working in tech, I would probably question why im using it in the first place. Is the entertainment value worth the cost?
Holy shit, thinking of all the resources that are just wasted for this shit... Imagine you could just slash all web infrastructures by two thirds.
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.
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
Why do you think that such bots cause a relevant amount of traffic?
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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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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Soon there will be content created and consumed entirely by generative "ai," an almost shadow-culture.
100% on Twitter, 150% on Facebook. Or maybe the other way around 🤷
Was scrolling through Facebook as I still use it to keep in touch with family. 20 sponsored posts for every one actual post. Facebook is terrible.
I just went on my annual visit. I'm not sure if it was ublock or what, but it was actually a fairly pleasant experience with no 'sponsored' content. Reminded me of the Facebook of old. Accessed through the browser, of course. I don't want that cancerous app on my phone.
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How are you about to do that on Facebook? I can't even sign up without it asking for my ID
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Horse shit.
Sandvine still released traffic reports. So does Cable Labs.
Maybe attempted connections, but not volume / tonnage / bytes.
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And I thought porn and cat pictures where responsible for 70% of web traffic... TIL
This is just what the bots are into.
It's why AI porn is so popular all of a sudden, all the bots thought human porn was weird.
70% of my web traffic, anyways.
Yeah dead internet. And I hope this news will kill online marketing for good
As long as real users exist on the internet, marketing will follow. If centralized social media will be even more of a shithole than already is, then they will slowly target the decentralized. You won't escape marketing.
But if 73% of traffic is fake, and they monitor traffic to determine sentiment and marketing strategies, then who are they actually marketing TO?
Those left over who are still human.
But you do bring up a great point, what happens when the Internet is nothing but bots/shills?
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I miss the days when the internet was a fad that most people were apathetic towards.
before we even had search engines, and had to rely on websites listing links to every website.
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i hate it when i open my laptop and there’s an error sign blocking the trackpad
Bot wars
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