4 ms·

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is only possible on Android, right? The video linked by ultimoo shows an Android, and my perception is that iO

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is only possible on Android, right? The video linked by ultimoo shows an Android, and my perception is that iOS sandboxing is much tighter. How can Instacart combat this? They can't require iOS among their shoppers. Is it going to be an arms race of heuristics and anti-cheat code like it is for games that want to prevent aim-bots? Or they could start running their own algorithm on the back-end, release juicy batches first to shoppers that haven't gotten a good one recently.

rtsil 6y ago
They can add any sort of captcha challenge or publish fake juicy shopping orders as honeypot, since the bots will instantly grab them. Of course, the next step will be to pay a sweatshop in a poor country to contantly monitor and grab the offers. There's no end to human greed, as evidenced by the Uber Eats couriers outsourcing to undocumented migrants at pennies on the dollar (or the euro) in France.
- botwriter 6y ago
  funny you say that I think the same thing is happening in the UK with these fast food delivery apps they all seem to be Eritrean.
tptacek 6y ago
Smaller teams than Instacart have put up effective fights against cheating. It's an arms race, but so what? The goal is to make cheating uneconomical, not impossible.
- function_seven 6y ago
  There's always some cost to having to implement countermeasures. In games, I've seen seen poorly-implemented anti-cheat software kick or ban legitimate players from their games. A sibling comment mentioned captchas. That would suck for legitimate Instacart shoppers. Imagine frantically looking for each photo that has a stop sign in it, knowing that the orders you're trying to claim could be snatched up by someone who's a faster captcha solver. Somehow there's always a cost when bots start to wage war against other bots. Sure, they can figure out how to minimize it for the human, while making it uneconomical for the bots to exist. I guess I'm just curious how they're going to do that. Because I can already see the blog post now: "Instacart Banned Me for No Reason"
- _jal 6y ago
  Every service I've been involved with that was useful enough to succeed ended up implementing mechanisms to deter undesirable behavior. (I blame the humans.) If you look at it the right way and are not currently under attack, they can be a lot of fun to work out and implement.
sbierwagen 6y ago
Physical robots that poke touchscreens exist, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/31/tapsters-robots-are-built-to-poke-touchscreens/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/31/tapsters-robots-are-built-... The analog hole stikes again.
habosa 6y ago
They actually could require iOS among their shoppers. I did Postmates deliveries in ~2015 and they handed each delivery person an iPhone 5c with the courier app preinstalled.

rtsil 6y ago

They can add any sort of captcha challenge or publish fake juicy shopping orders as honeypot, since the bots will instantly grab them. Of course, the next step will be to pay a sweatshop in a poor country to contantly monitor and grab the offers. There's no end to human greed, as evidenced by the Uber Eats couriers outsourcing to undocumented migrants at pennies on the dollar (or the euro) in France.

botwriter 6y ago
funny you say that I think the same thing is happening in the UK with these fast food delivery apps they all seem to be Eritrean.

tptacek 6y ago

Smaller teams than Instacart have put up effective fights against cheating. It's an arms race, but so what? The goal is to make cheating uneconomical, not impossible.

function_seven 6y ago
There's always some cost to having to implement countermeasures. In games, I've seen seen poorly-implemented anti-cheat software kick or ban legitimate players from their games. A sibling comment mentioned captchas. That would suck for legitimate Instacart shoppers. Imagine frantically looking for each photo that has a stop sign in it, knowing that the orders you're trying to claim could be snatched up by someone who's a faster captcha solver. Somehow there's always a cost when bots start to wage war against other bots. Sure, they can figure out how to minimize it for the human, while making it uneconomical for the bots to exist. I guess I'm just curious how they're going to do that. Because I can already see the blog post now: "Instacart Banned Me for No Reason"
_jal 6y ago
Every service I've been involved with that was useful enough to succeed ended up implementing mechanisms to deter undesirable behavior. (I blame the humans.) If you look at it the right way and are not currently under attack, they can be a lot of fun to work out and implement.

sbierwagen 6y ago

Physical robots that poke touchscreens exist, of course: https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/31/tapsters-robots-are-built-to-poke-touchscreens/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/31/tapsters-robots-are-built-... The analog hole stikes again.

habosa 6y ago

They actually could require iOS among their shoppers. I did Postmates deliveries in ~2015 and they handed each delivery person an iPhone 5c with the courier app preinstalled.