How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: December 28, 2018 at 1:50:35 AM GMT+9
> To: Interesting Stuff list <is () iconia com>
> Subject: IS: How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
>
> EXCERPT:
> In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of 
> $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two 
> things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which 
> to host them.
>
> The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. 
> Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty 
> websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic 
> ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an 
> impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, 
> meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots 
> “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some 
> were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have 
> done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake 
> cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where 
> the only real things were the ads.
>
> How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web 
> traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 
> 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so 
> high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would 
> begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”
>
> In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I 
> will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots 
> already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host 
> in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every 
> aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that 
> once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet 
> is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you 
> encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, 
> as you turn it over in your head...
>
> [...]
> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  



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