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I had roughly the same problem. My facebook career lasted for all of thirty seconds before they decided I was a robot and banned my account. I appealed and they
by zxcvbn4038 8y ago
I had roughly the same problem. My facebook career lasted for all of thirty seconds before they decided I was a robot and banned my account. I appealed and they asked me to send a photo. I sent them a photo and they said I was still a robot and there was no further appeal. Very helpful. So my choices from that point are to 1) shame them in the media and hope its an entertaining enough story that people like it or 2) do something better with my time then facebook. I chose the latter.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- shawnz 8y agoWere you using an unusual user agent or a VPN or something?
- askvictor 8y agoWhy would they bother checking the user agent when it's the easiest thing to spoof (really, you probably can't even call it spoofing)
- shawnz 8y agoI'd bet that the vast majority of botters/phishers which Facebook deals with are amateurs. That said, I meant using unusual user agent software, not really just having an unusual user agent string.
- HenryBemis 8y agoNo need for software, one can easy change it on the about:config of Firefox and/or there are some cool add-ons that can rotate/change the user agent of a Firefox on the "desired frequency"
- adrianhel 8y agoWe have a Wordpress site that suddenly saw a surge of hacking attempts. Turns out they all had IE7 user agents. Blocked that, not a problem anymore. Wouldn't surprise me if big sites use simple measures for such simple attack attempts as well.
- codeulike 8y agoTwist: he is a robot, and when he sent them a photo, it was a robot photo. Square metal head, lights for eyes, antenna coming out the top. The works.
- felipemnoa 8y agoThat would have been hilarious! Somebody should try it when they I accuse you of being a robot.
- cma 8y agoMaybe he isn't a robot, but his given birth name was zxcvbn4038
- jacobush 8y agoor bobby tables
- HenryBemis 8y ago"Little Bobby Tables we call him..." That is my favourite XKCD comic!
- kerneis 8y agoA friend of mine uses a fake last name on Facebook because her real name is Fake, which they refuse to accept as real. (Her name is actually Faux, which means fake in French.)
- dylan604 8y agoI would assume a submitted photo of a robot would go over just as well as when I was once asked to add a picture to the company's internal website of employees by our HR dept. I never add photos of me to anything, so instead, in good humor, downloaded a random anonymous silhouette type avatar. That didn't work for them, and I was told "I need a picture of you". So, I open up photoshop, found a generic picture frame online, and added the word YOU inside the frame. Shortly after this, my supervisor comes in to pay me a visit. Some people just have no sense of humor.
- yorwba 8y agoI got banned from Twitter within 5 Minutes of trying to figure out the user interface, and my best guess as to why it happened is that their anomaly detection is overfit to their existing users. So when a new user starts exploring randomly instead of directly going to look at ads, they're behaving much more like a scraper than what the system has learned to recognize as a normal user.
- shawnz 8y agoI think that's very unlikely. There are over 100,000 new accounts created on Twitter every day so we would expect a large and frequent amount of bans if what you are saying were true. Furthermore most Twitter visitors don't have accounts so it would be pretty foolish to base their anomaly detection on a metric that most of their visitors fail.
- berdario 8y agoIt's actually well known that you'll get blocked by Twitter within the first 2 minutes of registering, whatever you'll do. They probably use it as a way to enforce their "soft" requirement of a phone number. After verifying that you have a working phone number, you'll get unblocked. Also, Twitter routinely renders their tweets unaccessible to non-logged-in users, due to rate limits on their api (which is used by their web frontend). So, I'm not one bit surprised if anyone would describe Twitter as foolish: that's exactly how they act
- thaumasiotes 8y agoHey, I have some experience creating intentionally suspicious Twitter accounts. There is no phone number requirement. They're just as happy with an email address. If you provide neither of those, then your account functionality is restricted (with a big obvious banner showing at the top of every page), but you still don't get blocked. Once I needed to create several accounts at once and then have all but one of them follow the last one. Those accounts got blocked, but it's hard to blame Twitter for that.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
- muzani 8y agoYou could have done both. I'd love to see an article on that.
- quickthrower2 8y ago> My facebook career Interesting interview process!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- defertoreptar 8y agoJust throwing this out there. Have you considered that maybe you are a robot?
- FabHK 8y agoReasonable. Just look at its name.
- fargo 8y agoThe Turing self-test
- echelon 8y agoI know this comment is in jest, but please don't joke on Hacker News as you would on Reddit. Posts like this add little informational content, spawn a thread of joke responses, and take time away from hundreds of people who are here to read high signal commentary. Sorry to be so profoundly un-fun. edit: I'm being downvoted, but consider the comment chain this has generated.
- grigjd3 8y agoIf everyone keeps telling you you're a robot...
- RegW 8y agoDo you still have all those photos Deckard?
- markman 8y agoDid you come up with that all by yourself? Aren't you the clever one? Full of balderdash and Tom foolery!
- dzhiurgis 8y agoNot an outright ban, but I am unable to use Interactive Brokers client portal (or even signup form) using a regular internet connection. It keeps timing out, logging me out, etc. Bizarre part is it works fine when I tether via my iPhone. Also there seems to be growth of websites in NZ that use some sort of Cloudflare-like proxy that very often straight up blocks requests to some simple blogs. Unsure whether it's user agent, ad blocker or my IP is quite dirty, but try to open up www.pointhacks.co.nz and click thru older posts...
- everdev 8y agoI have received a "suspicious activity" warning on Twitter for any new account I've helped open up over the last year. You can confirm your identity by entering your phone number and receiving a text. I feel like it's more of a cheap ploy to get additional info after your first 25 tweets than it is any bot detection algorithm.
- dklsafhjskljfl 8y agoIt's not, it's really not. They really do want to verify you're a person. Facebook got busted using that (security) info for marketing purposes, and the reaction was muted; but, within the security community, it was loud and angry. Within a week, they had ceased completely.
- chipperyman573 8y agoDon't they still use your phone number you give them for 2FA for advertising? https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your-2fa-phone-number-to-target-you-with-ads/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your...
- j88439h84 8y agoDo you happen to know a source for that?
- krageon 8y agoWhere are you getting that they ceased completely? This is a large company who has a vetted history of absolutely zero ethical accountability. The reasonable thought is that they learned to hide it better, not that they stopped doing it at all.
- _pmf_ 8y ago> I appealed and they asked me to send a photo. I sent them a photo and they said I was still a robot and there was no further appeal. That's the plot of Blade Runner 2.
- mcv 8y agoI would have sent them a photo of a robot.
- lloeki 8y agoI would have disguised as a robot and sent them a picture of me. Ironically sending a robot picture is the best proof that you're not one, since robots don't have a sense of humour (yet). Wait; lightbulb moment; someone has to run a NN against a dad joke DB and learn AI to crack some (like the generated face stuff). Well this is the internets and all, so I suppose it's been done before but no one would admit to owning such a big enough dad joke DB...
- tripzilch 8y ago> someone has to run a NN against a dad joke DB and learn AI to crack some A "that's what she said" detector can be implemented as a two class identification problem. This 2011 describes one algorithm that achieves 71% precision: That's What She Said: Double Entendre Identification https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-2016 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P11-2016 I believe they could have done an even better job with better training (and test) data. It seems to me there's a big problem with how they selected the negative examples: one of the sources is a set of racy text messages, which would be rife with positives. They claim TWSS positives are rare in general, but I doubt that holds for a sexy text messages corpus. Their overall strategy is pretty interesting though (not deep learning).
- megous 8y agoTelling them to fuck off (to the photo request) would have been more human. Following orders is very robot like, you know.
- zdf 8y agoIronic, given that Zuckerburg is a robot.
- werid 8y agoSigning up for facebook, after a short period, they'll lock your account due to suspicious activity, even if you have done nothing (maybe that's suspicous?), and demand a phone number or a photo. If you sign up and provide a phone number, they'll just demand a photo. Twice. Giving them the same photo seems to work though, and leave your account in peace... They never accused me of being a robot though.