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ctrl_freak

380 karma · joined June 4, 2010

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ctrl_freak··on Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
I'm wondering this too. I used to work at a DSP and we had to deal with a lot of clickfraud. Typically it took the form of: a shady publisher which has somewhat legitimate content and has a relationship with one or more SSPs. Then the publisher goes to "traffic growth" sites like cpmbux.com, and purchases fake traffic. Those fake traffic sites own botnets which they leverage to generate the fake impressions on those publisher's websites. Because there's this separation between the two parties, even if the publisher gets shut down by the SSP for engaging in clickfraud (there's still plausible deniability), the fake traffic site can continue marketing themselves to other not so by-the-book publishers.

I'm not sure if it's a similar arrangement here. The linked report makes it sound like they own the publisher sites too, but it's hard for me to fathom how they could maintain "legitimate" relationships with SSPs when they're funnelling out millions of dollars per day. It goes without saying that it's much harder to fake your way through the financial system.

ctrl_freak··on Hackers Make $5M a Day by Faking 300M Video Views
When ads are sold programatically (at least at the exchange level), they're almost always done on an impression basis, not a click basis. So by the time you see the ad, most of the financial exchange has already taken place. Some DSPs, like Criteo, charge their clients on a CPC basis, so you're affecting their downstream clients but not Criteo itself.

Depending on the exchange, you can sometimes see how much the DSP/client paid for the impression by looking at the win notification URL. Typically there will be a URL query parameter that has been filled in by the exchange, like `BID_CPM=4.00`, and when your browser requests this URL (which is owned by the DSP/client), your browser is effectively notifying the winner of the auction that they won and how much it cost. However, ad exchanges are increasingly sending these fields encrypted to protect against manipulation/fraud.

If you really want to manipulate the amount of money that advertisers pay to show you ads, look at what ad botnets like the one in this article do. The PDF above only briefly mentions it, but one of the things they do to increase their perceived value to DSPs and clients is they make their browsers visit high value advertisers websites (e.g. they might visit a shopping website and put items in their cart to make it look like they were strongly considering purchasing the items). Later, when you visit a publisher site, this will cause the bidders' machine learning systems to predict a much higher value for you than they otherwise would have, and submit higher bids as a result.

ctrl_freak··on Venezuela’s Currency Has Had its Biggest Monthly Collapse
That was an interesting read; thanks for sharing. I'm always fascinated reading the latest exposes on the Venezuela saga.
ctrl_freak··on Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back into China
Yeah, if you're referring to a mediocre replacement which no one uses, I guess there's diaspora: https://www.joindiaspora.com/
ctrl_freak··on Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana
> this is the first incident where autopilot was involved with an inattentive driver

The other (fatal) crash involved an inattentive driver watching a Harry Potter movie:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-dri...

ctrl_freak··on UK votes to leave EU
> For comparison, just look at how crazy expensive airfares are in the States for similar flights.

I assume you're referring to the cost of a comparable domestic flight within the US.

How can you credit the success of the EU for your $80 flight ticket and then compare this to the US? It obviously goes without saying that the US is a far more effective and integrated union than the EU (the EU is not even a fiscal union). I suspect the difference in flight costs has more to do with population sizes than "political unions".

ctrl_freak··on Toronto is poised to become a producer of tech startups
> The gotcha is that the moment you leave the country your TN is kaput, so you're effectively trapped in the USA until the green card process is complete.

Not quite true. Once you've filed for adjustment of status (which you can only do once your priority date is current), you can also file an I-131 for advanced parole, and after receiving this, you can leave and re-enter the US with it. Technically you're not on a TN anymore though.

ctrl_freak··on Facebook bends the rules of audience engagement to its advantage
> The things that happen on Facebook don't matter.

In my own experience, that's just not true. Facebook has facilitated lots of social interactions for me that simply would not have happened otherwise. Some examples:

- I was doing an internship in Australia for a few months. I posted a picture of the beach on Facebook, an old friend from highschool whom I hadn't talked to in years saw it, commented that I should come visit her in Melbourne. I did, and we met and caught up on life.

- A friend of mine invited me to go to a music festival with her friends. She added me to a group message on Facebook that they were using to plan logistics, etc. After the festival, we continued using the chat to plan other social activities.

- Casual acquaintances that I met once or twice invite me to parties, etc.

Can these things happen without Facebook? Technically, I suppose so. Realistically, I think they would happen less frequently. IMO there's a big difference between Messenger/Events/Groups (facilitates a lot of real interactions) vs News Feed/Profiles (stalking other people).

ctrl_freak··on Currency War: U.S. Hedge Funds Mount New Attacks on China's Yuan
All other things being equal, a weak currency is a good thing for a country. Unfortunately for China, a weak currency comes with a host of other problems, one of the most significant is capital outflow:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-25/china-capi...

ctrl_freak··on “No Cost” License Plate Readers Are Turning Texas Police into Debt Collectors
The information becomes more private the more aggregated it gets. If you have a stalker following you around everywhere, you can get a restraining order against them. If detailed information of your locations were to be available online, you couldn't stop anyone from looking at it.
ctrl_freak··on P vs. NP: An Assumption That Runs the Internet
TSP is NP-hard -- we don't know if it's in NP (that is, we don't even know if there's a polynomial time algorithm to verify whether a proposed solution is optimal). The decision problem of TSP is NP-complete:

> The problem has been shown to be NP-hard (more precisely, it is complete for the complexity class FPNP; see function problem), and the decision problem version ("given the costs and a number x, decide whether there is a round-trip route cheaper than x") is NP-complete. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem#Co... )

The author got this wrong in the article -- just because you can check that each house has been visited in polynomial time proves nothing.

ctrl_freak··on Biking The Ho Chi Minh Highway
A couple of months ago, I bought a $300 Chinese knock-off Honda Win motorcycle (~100cc) in Ho Chi Minh City and did pretty much the same route as this guy, albeit with much fewer stops. It was pretty incredible. Definitely the best way to experience Vietnam.

A similar highway exists in Thailand, the Mae Hong Son Loop[1], which I also did on motorcycle while I was backpacking Southeast Asia. Also highly recommended.

[1] http://wikitravel.org/en/Mae_Hong_Son_Loop

ctrl_freak··on Firms help websites evade ad blockers
> Don't websites get paid for(most of?) the ads only when user clicks through?

Depends on the inventory. CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click) pricing models are both common in the online advertising industry, though CPM is more common with higher end publishers:

https://written.com/blog/51/cpm-cpc-cpa-pricing-online-media

ctrl_freak··on How Mexican heroin cartels are targeting small-town America
"Prescription drug abuse and addiction kill far more people in the U.S. every year than all illegal drugs combined."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wicked-deeds/201404/pre...

ctrl_freak··on Volkswagen Is Ordered to Recall Nearly 500k Vehicles Over Emissions Software
> is creating ozone a bad thing?

At the ground level, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone

"Ozone is a powerful oxidant (far more so than dioxygen) and has many industrial and consumer applications related to oxidation. This same high oxidising potential, however, causes ozone to damage mucous and respiratory tissues in animals, and also tissues in plants, above concentrations of about 100 ppb. This makes ozone a potent respiratory hazard and pollutant near ground level."

ctrl_freak··on Facebook Chats Are Being Scanned by a CIA Funded Company?
The question isn't whether In-Q-Tel supports the CIA. It's whether Facebook was funded by In-Q-Tel, and even the article that Wikipedia uses as a citation doesn't seem too sure how strong of a connection there is:

> The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".

ctrl_freak··on Torrent site Kickass.so has domain banned
Your DNS is probably cached and hasn't updated yet.
ctrl_freak··on A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics
"Computer science" can mean many different things, but theoretical CS is largely considered a branch of mathematics. While there is some 'code', it has all of the same formalisms, equations and proofs. CS papers can be just as inaccessible as other types of math, if not more so.
ctrl_freak··on How browsers get to know you in milliseconds
> If they have no data on you, I assume ad exchanges supply default advertisements, or there are bidders on default ads?

To be clear on what happens here: the ad exchange itself isn't usually interested in identifying you per se, it's the bidders. So for example the ad exchange might send the bidders a bid request that has some information like this:

Country, user agent, time zone, website that will be showing the ad, size/location of the ad, etc.

Then it's up to the bidders to try to figure out how much this impression would be worth and then bid appropriately. Even if they can't 'identify' the user as someone they've seen before, they might still bid on the ad because the website showing the ad might be relevant to the product they're trying to sell. If the only information they have about a user is what is passed in the bid request they would probably bid lower.

I don't know what the behaviour is for when an a bid request doesn't receive any bids, but it would be exchange-dependent, and likely rare on the major exchanges.

ctrl_freak··on How browsers get to know you in milliseconds
> Does anyone have any other reading recommendations on this topic, or advertising recommendation in general?

Sure. What's being discussed in this article is Real Time Bidding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding . You can read up about the specifics of different Real Time Bidding exchanges, for example here's Google's AdExchange protocol: https://developers.google.com/ad-exchange/rtb/

> How are different websites able to know what content you are interested- who is storing this data on people?

The websites that host the actual content don't usually care about what ads are being shown to you. They just put code in from an ad exchange and let them handle the rest. The buyers (the ones who run the bidders) are the ones that are interested in figuring out what to show you. For example, many bidders are interested in doing what's called Behavioural Retargeting ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting ). Say you visit a shoes website. Then later you go on Facebook. The moment you go on Facebook, their ad exchange FBX will send a bid request to all the bidders. If the shoes website has partnered with that ad exchange, when they receive the bid request, they can identify you by your cookie, and they can bid and try to show you an ad to get you to come back to their site. Typically a shoes website wouldn't have the infrastructure to do real time bidding so they get a third party to do the bidding on their behalf, e.g. AdRoll ( https://www.adroll.com/retargeting ).

ctrl_freak··on Statement on Bloomberg News story that NSA knew about the “Heartbleed bug”
> Is there any historical evidence of disclosures from the NSA to the open-source community?

I would suspect that NSA would want to conceal the fact that the disclosure came from them.

ctrl_freak··on Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?
This is probably the address in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:82.148.97.69/header
ctrl_freak··on Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
My anecdotal experience at Guangzhou (2 months ago), flying internationally, was the opposite. Didn't have to remove shoes, didn't have to take my laptop out of my bag. I was going to remove my belt before going through the metal detector but they told me not to, which set off the alarm. All they did was wave a handheld metal detector over my body and then I was through. Didn't get patted down and didn't have to go through a body scanner.
ctrl_freak··on Eagle scout. Idealist. Drug trafficker?
Couldn't that be accomplished with a bluetooth connection from your mobile phone? Maybe not as effective as a bracelet, but it probably could have gotten the job done in this case.
ctrl_freak··on Banks Say No to Marijuana Money, Legal or Not
How is that any worse security than keeping money in a bank account?
ctrl_freak··on Homeless, Unemployed, and Surviving on Bitcoins
> The math doesn't add up.

I would imagine they pay less (in bitcoins) now than they did, say, a year ago.

ctrl_freak··on We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing
> Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

They don't, but retroactively taking away their /8s would be extremely complicated and expensive for them, not to mention that there is very little benefit from prolonging exhaustion by perhaps 1-2 years at most.

ctrl_freak··on Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.
You would think more Americans would fly to India to get expensive medical procedures done. Or are there other issues that need to be overcome to do this?
ctrl_freak··on Preparing a Mac laptop for your Grandma
With respect to requiring Flash on YouTube, have you checked out YouTube5[1]? I've found that I can use most of the web without Flash using this extension (of course, it depends which websites your grandma uses...)

[1] http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/

ctrl_freak··on Your top 100 unix commands, for science
Yeah I just realized that. Fixed.
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