America’s DIY Phone Farmers
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Original URL: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3naek/how-to-make-a-phon...
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Start with a distance function from url to url. Easiest would be based on simple URL string distance (would have shown this as very similar). If you want to get fancy, fetch the content and do a distance function on that. I guess you can endlessly tweak that distance function, incorporate <meta canonical, etc. Probably unnecessary.
Then: order by distance asc limit 5, ask users “is your URL a dupe of any of these?”
Although a pretty solid alternative solution is: let the community deal with it. It’s not a huge problem at the moment, I don’t think anyone particularly minds (?). HN doesn’t do all it “should”, and (personally) that’s precisely what’s enjoyable. So what if there’s a dupe? Someone posts the original, problem solved :D
As long as nobody feels bad, everything’s rosy.
Crawl the page, create similarity hashes of the text and image contents, and keep track of the metadata and outbound links, which will probably match or mostly match between page versions, and related pages (particularly if they contain social media tags, or author and publisher, etc.)
If any two submissions match text and images within some margin, or share the same links, consider one a possible dupe and ask the user if they want to post it or just vote up what seems to be the existing article (this will allow user curation to reduce false positives.) Also, automatically flag reposts for mod review later.
Also, when profits decline, you can still use the phones to host an Android app-testing service...
These buyers probably set a price floor for the lowest end of the market, between barely usable and the shredder.
They probably get some bulk deals from recyclers for the Grade D units.
Might even be able to make some Grade A or B units for resale if they have lots of parts.
> One farmer said they do sometimes virtualize phones on their PC, but due to how resource intensive that can be on the computer, it works out as more cost effective to have a selection of cheap phones instead.
And also it's pretty easy to detect.
Simply put: "It doesn't work like that." ™
Instead of emulating the OS, you could emulate app by simulating the I/O network traffic.
PayTV pirates did this with smart cards: just replaced the entire thing with a chip that knew what to respond for each challenge/demand.
For mobile web various fingerprinting techniques are available. As a fun (and quite irrelevant) example, you can immediately tell chrome, safari, firefox and node apart just with:
atob('Ψ')
xBluestacks in different configurations was among the things I tried.
Lost interest and decided the developers just don't want me as a potential customer.
With reduced screen brightness, I’d bet they’re at 2 or 3 watts per. That’s a few dollars a year for electricity, 24/7, per unit at 10c/kwh.
Would love to see some solar panel contraptions that switch between grid and solar, using whatever oomph the battery still has left.
Actually that happened in 2008 and caused a terrible recession that effected more than just bankers.
Perhaps introducing regulation would be a better way of dealing with unscrupulous ad firms.
Because it's not like advertising is even that lucrative to begin with. Even Facebook, which is the king of ad monetization, only does about $120 annual ARPU for American users (and a lot less in other regions). That sounds like a lot until you realize the average user spends 38 minutes a day on the site. That's 30 cents per hour of use.
That comes with the clutter of the ads, the loss of privacy from all the tracking, much slower page loads, and lower content quality since the content algorithm's optimizing to maximize ad spend rather than user delight. I'd posit that the vast majority of Facebook users be much happier with $0.30 an hour for the much better ad-free experience.
And that's even in the most extreme ad-tilted case. Now consider a run-in-the-mill site like Reddit. Their annual ARPU is only about $1.00. That means Reddit's literally monetizing fractions of a penny per hour of use. I'm absolutely positive that all but those who are so cheap they're on verging on mentally ill, would pay one penny an hour to use Reddit.
The problem isn't ad-tech, it's not the surveillance, it's not even the data leaks or viruses; advertising itself is the problem. There's no amount of regulation that is going to make it "good," at best, it will remain a tumor on our free market system until it is excised once and for all. That is, assuming it doesn't kill it outright in its seemingly endless race to the bottom.
There is a part of the Internet where ads cannot/have not gone. Just use that. (Or the next one..)
I certainly don't see it as anything approaching fraud in the ethical sense. Advertisers are paying for clicks / "views", and that's what they're getting. If people want to game that system I see that as entirely fair game.
I'm not sure I would include the behavior discussed in the article under "Ad Fraud". Usually "Ad Fraud" refers schemes where someone hosts an Ad and then fraudulently delivers fake traffic/clicks to that Ad to get paid.
My guess is that the real money and real players in this space are not running incentivized ad apps, but being paid to generate traffic for REAL Ad Fraud.
There’s a lot of transferable skills gained, but it can be hard to sell it to most employers.
Nobody cared about my hundreds of EBay sales on my resume in my late teens, but it taught me a lot:
Working with customers, how to sell and differentiate your product, managing money, managing inventory, getting cut out by Chinese competition with pricing you couldn’t possibly match...