posted in Technology
Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it
www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/ukraine-drone-strike-yandex-russian-bot-farm-right-wing-maga-afd-reform-uk-conspiracy-theory-viral-rumor/Replying to @purrtastic@lemmy.nz
This story, that Cloudflare reported lower identified automated bot and API traffic from the ASN of the destroyed data centres, has been so massively warped it’s insane.
It demonstrates that average people and apparently tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all.
When residential proxies affect at least a third of US households, you don’t need to route through a data centre that will be flagged as bot traffic. You set up a wire guard config and route to a residential proxy installed on millions of smart TVs, android boxes, smart appliances, desktop computers, and phones.
Seriously, I recently mapped multiple residential proxy networks with over 30 million unique US ips that were just scraping. You can use math to reliably fingerprint these networks, they’re big, with hundreds of millions of IPs involved, and you can rotate them via an API call to clean ones.
Zero of this traffic would be taken down by these strikes. We didn’t even see any perceptible change in internet traffic overall with this.
tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all.
I’m sure they just don’t care. The vast amount of modern “journalism” is just reposting someone else’s story. And if they get clicks, they don’t much particularly care if it’s accurate.
Replying to @artyom@piefed.social
Modern journalism, LOL. I’ve been reading on implementing Forths recently, there’s plenty of texts that don’t make sense, because how the hell do you change basic dictionary if you don’t have a dictionary already? There might be an implementation that doesn’t explicitly list that basic dictionary in the order of used ones, but what was literally written was wrong.
Even on things supposedly interesting only for people looking for specifics there’s plenty of vague and wrong texts. You start trying to approach the task by following them literally, then realize that’s not possible. Again and again. Until you just accept that you’ll get there faster if you make things up and do what you want, then add things you’ve missed along the way.