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The problem with looking at registration to identify bots is that it's easy to counteract. Right now, bots use simple methods for generating names, and fill out
by mistercow 13y ago
The problem with looking at registration to identify bots is that it's easy to counteract. Right now, bots use simple methods for generating names, and fill out the form instantly, because there's no incentive not to. Neither of those factors is difficult to change.
This article also commits the cardinal sin of telling us the false positive rate without also telling us the false negative rate, or the base rate. You can't tell much from "falsely flagged about 6 out of 10,000" alone.
- solistice 13y agoI predict roughly a month till they've circumvented it, if not sooner. A lot of these bots are simple contraptions, and simulating the way real people sign up to services seems to boil down to putting in some timers and a new name generating algorithm.
- mistercow 13y agoDepends on what you're going by. I'd give a 90% confidence interval for the first spam bot being modified to circumvent it between 1 hour after the paper was presented, and 1 day after it hit any site on the level of HN. But if we're talking about some higher degree of prevalence among spam bots, it will be a bit longer. I expect that there are a lot of spam bots out there that are running passively and haven't been touched by their creators in years.