
Tapster’s robots are built to poke touchscreens - hugs
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/31/tapsters-robots-are-built-to-poke-touchscreens
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ChuckMcM
Looks like a fun project, of course I wonder how much it would cost for 10 to
15 robots so that you could build your own little mobile ad click fraud farm.

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lnsru
I guess 100$ for Prusa Mendel 3D printer frame with steppers and controller
and 100$ for some no-name tablet. Is this clicking thing profitable?

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hugs
No, that's why most people use the robots instead for quality control /
testing of the products they make.

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lnsru
A company near by uses big industrial robots for credit card reader testing. I
am just curious what grey applications are possible.

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cocktailpeanuts
Just out of curiosity, since the creator seems to be on this thread, I have a
question:

I'm sure there's an optimal "taps per second" number, where once you go over
that threshold, the screens are unable to recognize the distinction. Can you
share those numbers if you have one? Super interested.

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hugs
(Tapster creator here) I've gotten my bots up to 800/taps per minute. I
haven't seen / gotten to a higher upper limit, yet, where it is unable to
recognize the distinction. However, what I have seen on iOS is after a few
hundred taps, the taps stopped being recognized in that spot on the screen.
Don't know if that's a bug or a feature of iOS to ignore touches at some
point.

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bluesign
In the context of automation (and click farms) if you are not testing the
touch screen obviously, I think better approach can be by man in the middle
attack with touchscreen and board. Or even emulate screen interface totally. I
dont know if has anyone tried that before

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mschuster91
The point is, sometimes you do want to test the full environment including the
touch screen. For example, you may want to check if the touchscreen locks up
after a number of taps, if your OS/input parsing layer can cope with the
jitter (a finger, in contrast to MITM-injected events, will almost never hit
the same x/y coordinates in a row), or you want to check against real
production hardware/software and not against something that's been modified
for testing in any way.

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maxxxxx
I always wanted to build a Lego robot to do UI automation on our Windows apps
and embedded devices. Point a camera at the screen, recognize screen elements
and then let the robot do the clicking.

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hugs
Do it!

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pjc50
These are rather fun. Our company has a more expensive oneoff solution, a
traditional six-axis robot which we use for testing chip-and-pin integration
by pressing the buttons on the pinpad.

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pimlottc
Neat! I always wondered how hard it would be to build a machine to play those
reaction-based ticket and prize redemption games.

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jjoonathan
Are they actually reaction-based or do they work like carnival / fair games
where they're actually completely rigged and only pretend to involve reaction
timing as a lure?

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jeffehobbs
Ugggggggghhhgh. The repercussions of this, I don't want to think about.

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hugs
Tapster creator here. Which repercussions?

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rhizome
The first thing I thought about was click-fraud.

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Buge
Click fraud on desktop is obviously much easier than on mobile.

Even on mobile, ideally (for the fraudster) it would be done in an emulator.
There are probably tricks that can be done to detect emulators though. I would
consider those flaws in the emulator that should be fixed.

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brownbat
Click farms are often a room full of phones on racks with cheap labor:

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/look-inside-
chines...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/look-inside-chinese-
click-farm-fake-followers-fake-likes-fake-reviews)

I don't think they're primarily doing "click fraud" for ads so much as account
creation (for spam), captcha defeats, and social media manipulation.

Maybe that's all click (tap?) fraud though.

Also... I'm not sure how Tapster compares to click farms on pricing. Aces them
on legitimacy though. So... I don't think a Fortune 500 company is going to
send their in development app over to Russian mobs for final bug testing. So
they might be same thing but very very different market segments.

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Buge
I think the cat and mouse game of finding an emulator aberration vs fixing the
emulator aberration is waited toward the finding side. Especially for complex
systems like current mobile devices, and when they are often heavily locked
down like iOS.

At some point the effort to develop a good enough emulator is more expensive
than just buying the physical devices.

But another option beyond emulator vs physical devices is physical devices
with physical tapping (Tapster) vs physical devices with emulated tapping.
That last option seems to be what is used in your video. It might be too
expensive to build an emulator, but it is cheaper to (jailbreak? and) emulate
touch inputs than to pay a person or a robot to put in real touch inputs.

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brownbat
Ha, and now it hits me that I used the video without any actual humans...
Maybe the cheap humans are falling by the wayside.

