
America’s DIY Phone Farmers - rwmj
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3naek/how-to-make-a-phone-farm
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nothrabannosir
3 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20589870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20589870)

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rwmj
Sorry about that - I thought HN automatically deduped submissions.

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nothrabannosir
Doesn’t matter, it should and if it doesn’t it’s not your fault. Never blame
the user ;)

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dang
Just out of curiosity, how would you write software to catch that those two
URLs pointed to the same thing?

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nothrabannosir
If you pressed me for an answer: similar to how Stackoverflow suggests
possibly related questions.

Start with a distance function from url to url. Easiest would be based on
simple URL string distance (would have shown this as very similar). If you
want to get fancy, fetch the content and do a distance function on that. I
guess you can endlessly tweak that distance function, incorporate <meta
canonical, etc. Probably unnecessary.

Then: order by distance asc limit 5, ask users “is your URL a dupe of any of
these?”

Although a pretty solid alternative solution is: let the community deal with
it. It’s not a huge problem at the moment, I don’t think anyone particularly
minds (?). HN doesn’t do all it “should”, and (personally) that’s precisely
what’s enjoyable. So what if there’s a dupe? Someone posts the original,
problem solved :D

As long as nobody feels bad, everything’s rosy.

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userbinator
The idea of "watching" ads for profit has always amused me a little --- what
if your mind is somewhere else or you're not looking at the screen? I suspect
that those who don't all-out farm but still do such things are not really
paying attention anyway. Of the people I know, no one _actually_ pays any
attention to ads even if they don't block them.

Also, when profits decline, you can still use the phones to host an Android
app-testing service...

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gregmac
The demographic seems off to me for this: How much revenue is there to make
from a customer that willingly spends their time watching ads? Is that the
person you want to invest in? What's the ROI of paying people to watch your
ads?

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whatshisface
It's a form of ad fraud. P&G isn't paying ad farms intentionally.

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chenlianmt
Phone farming is actually easy to be banned if the investors apply appropriate
fraud detection strategies such as IP/device ID collection or user behavior
classification. I wouldn't think phone farming is as profitable as it used to
be.

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ga-vu
Great... another way to waste electricity for some stupid reason.

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iddqa
Looks like it's more profitable than altcoin mining!

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amelius
Yes, but what is the break-even point, considering that each phone costs at
least $50?

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Moru
Doubt they use new phones, used can be gotten a lot cheaper

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phonebanshee
And used with broken screens are cheaper yet.

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jdnenej
Would it be possible to just run 100 instances of an android emulator?

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avip
Emulators would be immediately identifiable. This method can only work if the
fraudstee has no fraud detection mechanism at all.

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one2zero
How though? With Bluestacks you can emulate a few different types of phones
including Google Pixels.

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avip
For native apps blacklist default emulator MSIN and similar attributes (and
let the cat and mouse game begin).

For mobile web various fingerprinting techniques are available. As a fun (and
quite irrelevant) example, you can immediately tell chrome, safari, firefox
and node apart just with:

    
    
      atob('Ψ')
      x

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nradov
It would be wonderful if clever scammers could figure out a way to wreck the
entire Internet advertising economy. Burn the whole thing down.

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jdavis703
It would be wonderful if clever mortgage fraudsters could figure out a way to
wreck the entire housing economy. Burn the whole thing down. It will make
housing more affordable.

Actually that happened in 2008 and caused a terrible recession that effected
more than just bankers.

Perhaps introducing regulation would be a better way of dealing with
unscrupulous ad firms.

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FussyZeus
What regulations would you propose? Ad-tech is doing what advertising does,
only better. They've taken the industry to its logical conclusions; a
catastrophic surveillance system deployed to sell you shit.

The problem isn't ad-tech, it's not the surveillance, it's not even the data
leaks or viruses; advertising _itself_ is the problem. There's no amount of
regulation that is going to make it "good," at best, it will remain a tumor on
our free market system until it is excised once and for all. That is, assuming
it doesn't kill it outright in its seemingly endless race to the bottom.

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whatshisface
Banning advertising would be the greatest imaginable victory for big brands
and the end of small B2C business. The advertising that has already happened
would get culturally locked in forever (would anybody forget Coca Cola?) and
it would be illegal for new market entrants to change it.

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FussyZeus
I mean, this is just the logical conclusion of capitalism. A few monstrous
companies dominating industry. It was held back from eating itself some time
ago when a bunch of massive corps were broken up, but that doesn't happen
anymore. Ironically, big business propaganda about how great big business is
has swayed the public so far away from regulating it that there's now nothing
standing in the way of capitalists destroying the capitalist system.

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frankydp
This is a strangely framed/toned article given the subject is run of the mill
Fraud and not entrepreneurship as implied.

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J-dawg
I know the term "fraud" is used throughout the article, but is this actually
fraud in the legal sense? (I assume not).

I certainly don't see it as anything approaching fraud in the ethical sense.
Advertisers are paying for clicks / "views", and that's what they're getting.
If people want to game that system I see that as entirely fair game.

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shkkmo
The article is fairly careful not to call phone farming of inctivized add apps
"fraud" directly (except for the first line).

I'm not sure I would include the behavior discussed in the article under "Ad
Fraud". Usually "Ad Fraud" refers schemes where someone hosts an Ad and then
fraudulently delivers fake traffic/clicks to that Ad to get paid.

My guess is that the real money and real players in this space are not running
incentivized ad apps, but being paid to generate traffic for REAL Ad Fraud.

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rubbercasing
surreal to think a simple tasks can end up with individuals making over 2,000
USD on the side by phone farming.

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Scoundreller
Was probably a fun hobby that also earned money. They probably learned a lot
in the process about how things work.

There’s a lot of transferable skills gained, but it can be hard to sell it to
most employers.

Nobody cared about my hundreds of EBay sales on my resume in my late teens,
but it taught me a lot:

Working with customers, how to sell and differentiate your product, managing
money, managing inventory, getting cut out by Chinese competition with pricing
you couldn’t possibly match...

