
Someone Has Filmed Inside a 'Click Farm' and It's Weird AF - selmat
http://www.ladbible.com/technology/technology-someone-has-filmed-inside-a-click-farm-and-its-weird-af-20170513
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SimonPStevens
I was surprised to see this is done with real hardware. I had expected VMs, or
faking the user agent, or even reverse engineering the http requests and
replaying them. Surely the economics is far better than buying 10s of
thousands of phones. I guess theres a reason I haven't thought of.

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scrollaway
My best guess is there needs to be a real SIM at the very least, so that the
requests come from legitimately different and randomly distributed IPs.

So you need a system that can virtualize all that, but still go through
separate SIMs. The cost of developing something like this probably doesn't
outweigh the "ease" of just faking it with real phones.

(On top of this I have my doubts about how much "tens of thousands of phones"
costs for someone who doesn't care about grey areas)

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mirimir
Here's Apple's version: [https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/facebook-lifts-the-
veil-on...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/facebook-lifts-the-veil-on-its-
mobile-device-lab/)

For testing apps :)

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mixedbit
I wonder why likes, stars, retweets and similar counters are not weighted by a
reputation in a user visible way. For the user a tweet with 1000 botnet
retweets looks exactly like a tweet with 1000 retweets by experts in a given
subject.

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notadoc
Someone recycled garbage content with a clickbait title and it's Weird AF

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serf
I hope 'AF' doesn't become a journalistic trend.

It seems trends bubble up from clickbait groups and then become adopted by
actual journalists lately.

Here's hoping this isn't one of the ones to become popular.

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wcummings
Huh i balked at that scene from silicon valley, thinking "surely this is all
virtualized". But look at this! Too weird.

