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Comment by levemi | Hacker News Reader

You're still trusting the client. Any system that trusts the client is flawed. Time to read per page varies, and if you read the original article it says the scammers are mitigating chances of alerts by clicking through a book over a three day period. You're going to find people who click through at very cost efficient means somewhere in the world when you're making $60,000 a month from this scam.

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You would still need to force the users through each page.

Fast-reading bad actor accounts can be flagged as abusers through pattern recognition. Since a subscription is necessary, creating numerous accounts to game the system becomes expensive fast.

This is kind of rough for technical or reference-ish books. Perfectly OK for fiction... well, except for anthologies and collections (HAL 9000 says I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you skip past the other Arthur C Clarke stories in this anthology, you'll have to read all the stories in order, at an acceptably slow speed)

I subscribe to F+SF and it would annoy me if I were technically prevented from skipping the end of stories that don't resonate with me.

Sorry, I meant the abusers would need to force their fraudulent user accounts through each page.

Normal people who don't find a book engaging can still skip the end, just that they'll (justifiably) be worth less to the author.

They don't have to be fast-reading. They can just create a fake log, and send it to the mothership after an appropriate period of time.

Still, I will agree that that will make scammers' lives harder.

Since only paid accounts are used in revenue attribution, faking logs for your own accounts would never work.

Amazon writes the client software (and ships hardware). If the clients communicate securely with the servers, Amazon should be able to trust them.

(I'm excluding Kindle Web Viewer, of course. Perhaps it should not have access to Kindle Unlimited.)

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