r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 18h ago

Society Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339
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49

u/RedikhetDev 15h ago

So all the advertisements you pay for on Reddit is actual for bots. And Reddit gets paid per view?

30

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 15h ago

Oh yeah of course.

Reddit, Google, x, many more, they do nothing about bots because bots are engagement, and engagement is ad revenue.

I'm seeing weird conflicting news about this sudden decrease in bots. I actually frequent a sub of just bots, the person who made it said new API changes was closing out all his bots.

So, did the api rules change or was it a Ukrainian attack?

17

u/Melodic_Side_9437 14h ago

The API change is that server is now in a million pieces.

13

u/jakenuts- 14h ago

My commercial website has been hammered by the same global bot swarm since early spring, thousands of dollars lost each month to search service bills before I got it behind CloudFlare. Same search from Brazil, Iraq, Singapore seconds apart and always new IP addresses, impossible to stop and relentless even after CloudFlare stopped them from reaching the site.

That all stopped October 8th. Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦

5

u/Widespreaddd 14h ago

From what I have gathered, it was the Ukrainian attack. They took out 3 of the 5 Yandex data centers, including one with a supercomputer used for LLM training. And bot traffic plummeted.

1

u/servermeta_net 14h ago

Which sub is all bots?

10

u/swearengens_cat 14h ago

r/worldnews

3

u/Your_Cat_In_Disguise 13h ago

Yup. I learned that the hard way. The bots just reply nonsense, too.

I was very confused at the fifteen nonsense replies I got on a comment saying tRump should be removed from office all within a minute of each other. 

Straight gibberish. Like, I know MAGA is illiterate, but I don't believe they are that bad.

3

u/Deltasims 11h ago

r/worldnews is really a strange case.

You can go from very-pro Ukraine comment sections to unhinged MAGA talking points

3

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 13h ago

It's called gpt2sim I believe.

I liked that the sub told you which comments were human and which were bots. Kind of gave me insight into how they respond.

1

u/HurtFeeFeez 8h ago

What is this bot sub you speak of?

1

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 7h ago

r/SubSimGPT2Interactive

It used to be a lot of bots basically harmlessly shitposting and replying to one another, but last week the creator said because of changes to api rules It's basically dead since last week.

Which makes me wonder, did the api rules change shut it down, or did his bots get taken out by this russian outtage.

1

u/HurtFeeFeez 7h ago

Took a look at some of the older posts. Wish I found out about it before the changes, the chaos was hilarious

5

u/Username524 14h ago

Didn’t some guy just get 18 months in prison for scamming Spotify in a very similar fashion, or is this absolutely different?

1

u/TheNegativePhoenix 14h ago

Dead internet theory 

1

u/DrButtgerms 14h ago

One of my buddies has a start-up and we talked about him advertising on social. I tried telling him that the numbers the company was advertising about impressions were at best, unverifiable, and likely completely fake (bots, etc). He didn't believe me. I wonder if he will now

1

u/KeyMyBike 13h ago

Please don't try to weaponize the ad providers against Reddit. Everyone tried the same thing against YouTube, and look at what that got us. We're stuck saying unalive and sewerslide.

1

u/gizamo 14h ago

Mostly Russian, Chinese, and Iranian bots.

Those are the groups most interested in and willing to engage in cyber warfare and propaganda campaigns to influence US elections.

1

u/cadium 14h ago

Don't forget there are probably also the same bots from the USA.

1

u/gizamo 14h ago

Kind of, but not in the same huge nunbers. There are tons of shill bots for US corporations, but they seem to farm out the botting overseas. The FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. probably have some, but their goals are usually more specific and targeted than the broad campaigns we see from Russia, China, and Iran.