5 ms·

There are tons. They are all massively privacy invading and horrible from an ethical perspective. The phrase you're looking for is something similar to bot man

by ev1 6y ago

There are tons. They are all massively privacy invading and horrible from an ethical perspective. The phrase you're looking for is something similar to bot management, that should get you results on most things. Akamai, Shape, Distil, list goes on. It's a dumb arms race. Lately, the purchases are tunneled through hijacked IP blocks and hacked/malware-running-proxies mobile devices as proxies.

nraphael8 6y ago
Interesting. Thanks. I was wondering why companies don’t uses services like this to provide better customer experience specifically for checkouts. It seems from what you’re saying these companies don’t operate in the most transparent way. Also, maybe companies like that their prices get so inflated to build hype.
- ev1 6y ago
  They use services like this. Almost all of them do - I used to build bot defence for streetwear related stuff. Like I said, it is an arms race. It's just like anticheat in online games, where the defending side needs to run invasive dynamically sent code as admin at all times and collect unnecessarily insane amounts of PII and data . Almost all major merchants use something similar, usually some kind of free product like Akamai's "included" product botmanager if they happen to use Akamai, or Cloudflare Bot Management, etc. Go on staples.com/target.com/tjmaxx.com/..any major brand for instance and look at the far bottom of the page, you'll see a blob of randomly generated filenames being included as JS - ctrl+f "/akam/". The setBm call here is botmanager. The buyer side is doing CFAA-illegal mass-scale BGP hijacking, wire fraud, carding, forgery of legal documents and letters of authorisation, and using hacked mobile devices, malware, botnets to get proxies to burn, on occasion DDoSing sites to try and "stop anyone else from getting them if I can't" type of behaviour. The seller side is sending invasive obfuscated, packed, borderline-abusive code (JS, wasm, webgl, enumerating fonts, running WebRTC, running Flash, running Java, sending .m3u playlists to try and get a media player addon to load, etc...) to execute on every client to try and detect automation and associate accounts together with persistent aggressive tracking. I see payloads where they try to extract a LAN IP via WebRTC and then try to port scan the entire /24 and localhost via <img onerror> and websockets, or bruteforce several 192.168/24 netblocks. I don't know about nvidia. I haven't known nvidia to ever sell stuff directly, though. Not sure about the 3xxx launch - I would assume they do this so rarely it hasn't come up often.
- ev1 6y ago
  Also, something I forgot to mention - this is the opposite of better customer experience at checkout. You will be sitting through endless captcha after captcha if you aren't lucky, and your orders are automatically assumed to be fraud if you run adblock, pihole, nextdns, ublock origin, or use obscure browsers like "firefox" or "opera" or "brave"...

by ev1 6y ago

nraphael8 6y ago

Interesting. Thanks. I was wondering why companies don’t uses services like this to provide better customer experience specifically for checkouts. It seems from what you’re saying these companies don’t operate in the most transparent way. Also, maybe companies like that their prices get so inflated to build hype.

ev1 6y ago
They use services like this. Almost all of them do - I used to build bot defence for streetwear related stuff. Like I said, it is an arms race. It's just like anticheat in online games, where the defending side needs to run invasive dynamically sent code as admin at all times and collect unnecessarily insane amounts of PII and data . Almost all major merchants use something similar, usually some kind of free product like Akamai's "included" product botmanager if they happen to use Akamai, or Cloudflare Bot Management, etc. Go on staples.com/target.com/tjmaxx.com/..any major brand for instance and look at the far bottom of the page, you'll see a blob of randomly generated filenames being included as JS - ctrl+f "/akam/". The setBm call here is botmanager. The buyer side is doing CFAA-illegal mass-scale BGP hijacking, wire fraud, carding, forgery of legal documents and letters of authorisation, and using hacked mobile devices, malware, botnets to get proxies to burn, on occasion DDoSing sites to try and "stop anyone else from getting them if I can't" type of behaviour. The seller side is sending invasive obfuscated, packed, borderline-abusive code (JS, wasm, webgl, enumerating fonts, running WebRTC, running Flash, running Java, sending .m3u playlists to try and get a media player addon to load, etc...) to execute on every client to try and detect automation and associate accounts together with persistent aggressive tracking. I see payloads where they try to extract a LAN IP via WebRTC and then try to port scan the entire /24 and localhost via <img onerror> and websockets, or bruteforce several 192.168/24 netblocks. I don't know about nvidia. I haven't known nvidia to ever sell stuff directly, though. Not sure about the 3xxx launch - I would assume they do this so rarely it hasn't come up often.
ev1 6y ago
Also, something I forgot to mention - this is the opposite of better customer experience at checkout. You will be sitting through endless captcha after captcha if you aren't lucky, and your orders are automatically assumed to be fraud if you run adblock, pihole, nextdns, ublock origin, or use obscure browsers like "firefox" or "opera" or "brave"...