I noticed that a *lot* of the crawlers/bots we see on www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com are spoofed e.g. a "Meta" crawler coming from 10s of different small ISPs across the world (the real one comes from a Meta ASN).
I deployed a change this morning which adds source ASN validation (alongside user-agent string analysis) to our "known crawlers/bots" classifier & well, the results speak for themselves. Attached graphs show RPS from "known crawlers/bots" to www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com.
#WebDev #BBC #Bots

Just gonna spend my whole day muting bots in the Federated Timeline. I love wasting my fucking time.
It should be mandatory that all bots post with a #bots so that it's easy to filter out

I and some others recently saw an interesting (clever but in a gross way) spam development, exploiting the privacy of favoriting.

It was an account set up as a bot using the Mastodon logo and name to appear official. Its profile was devoted entirely to text claiming your PC was infected and your account would be removed for slowing down Mastodon if you didn’t click a suspicious link to fix it. The account had no posts, follows, or followers.

It seemed to operate by favoriting potential victims’ posts without boosting, leaving no visible tracks of where it had been or what it was doing, while bringing eyes to its profile. I know I clicked over to its profile to see what the heck was up. I wasn’t the only one.

The scammers have arrived.

#bots #spam #scam #scammers #Mastodon #malware