3 ms·
If you saw a bunch of activity happening milliseconds before it should, why would you be the other party to someone you suspect is committing fraud? If no such
by vannevar 14y ago
If you saw a bunch of activity happening milliseconds before it should, why would you be the other party to someone you suspect is committing fraud?
If no such report had come out milliseconds later, the activity wouldn't be suspect. How could a person (or in this case, given the timeframe, an algorithm) possibly distinguish this spike from a 'legitimate' spike? It doesn't make sense to blame the victim of a fraud when the victim has no way of knowing at the time that they are being defrauded.
- danielweber 14y agoI presume the report didn't just randomly come out at some random time. That is, everyone knew exactly when it was going to come out.
- vannevar 14y agoTo the millisecond? I suppose it's possible. Even so, rumors drive spikes all the time. Someone could put out a false report, committing fraud in the reverse direction. I still doubt such a fraud could be detected at the time in any remotely reliable way.
- sirclueless 14y agoThe report is a government report, in machine-readable format, that is taken from a government server. If you wanted to put out a false report, you would have to hack the server or the connection to the server.
- vannevar 14y agoNo, you'd just have to convince people you were releasing inside information, like this kind of thing: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/28/tech/web/google-icoa-fake-news/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/28/tech/web/google-icoa-fake-... .