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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 28 2019, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the concert-ticket-sales dept.

In a growing number of online activities, bots are the main means of interaction. Online shopping is increasingly one of those areas. Vice has an interview with someone who built their own bot in order to compete against the other bots when buying online, just to have a chance at making a purchase for sought after items.

A tool for beating others to buying the items you want consists of three main components, finalphoenix explained. A monitoring bot, which scouts the target websites for new items; an account creation part, which will make a load of accounts on the site so you have a higher chance of pushing through the crowd as you control more of it; and a purchase bot, the part that actually orders and pays for your item. Users will also need to get some server space to run their bots.

Hiding from the clothes websites that you're using a bot is a bit more complicated; companies will likely ban you if they suspect you're scraping their website. Here, buyers need to use different accounts, proxies to route their traffic, and other technical means as workarounds.

Earlier on SN:
Facebook and CMU's AI Poker Bot Beat Five Pros at Once
TrickBot Malware Learns How to Spam -- Ensnares 250M Email Addresses
How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually


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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 29 2019, @05:13AM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday August 29 2019, @05:13AM (#887176) Journal
    You must be living in a bit of a bubble. I don't know many people, but I'd have no trouble naming other people that I know that do not have any accounts at any of the listed sites. Or at the most maybe posted something on pinstasnapbook and then forgot her login and/or which site it actually was, and never figured out how to recover it.

    I'd expect that to be even more true of immigrants, especially the ones from less well off countries trying to claim refugee status, which is the demographic the administration is clearly focused on.

    Like I said, it's CYA. I'm not suggesting anyone should lie on it. The best policy is to have no truck with any of those sites.

    And I doubt very much that the bad guys we're trying to stop would do actually report themselves here. They WILL lie, and only if the lie is particularly crude and ill-conceived is there much chance they'll be caught in it.

    Security theatre. Redundant where it is not impotent. I'm not in favor of it. I'm also not in favor of making it out as even more sinister than it is. It's the same thing we've been doing in airports for nearly two decades now.

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