In Germany, jet fuel is untaxed, whereas train companies have to pay tax on electricity, in particular renewable energy. Also, VAT is handled differently: if you buy a flight from Germany to another country, only a portion of what you paid for your plane ticket is taxed at German VAT rate, but for train tickets, 100% of the ticket price is taxed with the German VAT rate. These are several factors that make it quite a bit harder for the railway to compete with short-distance flights.
I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash.
The most usual technique is to setup click baits/traps, once you click on a trap link you (= IP or UID via cookie) are added to an ignore list, where all your actions are not invoiced to advertisers.
Simple and works,
Off course traps is not the only technique. What's also checked: do you use datacenter IP or not, which country/location, does your browser footprint looks like what you send by headers and user agent, some may even validate if you move mouse like a human (check how recaptca works). And also take into account that adtech companies have a lot of statistics to analyze, so single click will not be detected, but thousands likely will be.
This is effective. After all that is said and done. Ad marketplaces stop bidding on your pageview (at least, the quality ones do). Over time fewer networks want your impression and the publisher ends up seeing a worse RoI on ads.
This extension doesn't use selenium, plus that's not entirely true, selenium sees HTML and DOM while a user sees the final render; there's ways you can hide content from a user while showing it to Selenium-style bots.
If “ignore all clicks from a user that clicks >3 ads on a page” isn’t good enough for an ad network, it can add three or four ‘ads’ that technically are visible, but the same color as the page background. If a user clicks a few of them, ignore all clicks from that user on that page.
AdNauseam could detect that, too, but it gets exceedingly hard, slowing down the user’s browser. So, I think the ad network can win that battle.
Does it? I don't think you can reliably identify whether something is visible if the other site, which controls the CSS, does not want you to. It's a classical arms race situation.
Except that publishers will compare their own GA or MOAT data against what you’re reporting and wonder why the hell you’re reporting significantly fewer impressions than other networks and their own tools.
First like varelaz says, one important criteria is your ISP. MaxMind provides information whether you are "Corporate" or Residential. Generally when you are Corporate / Datacenter, you get into a low-quality tier or even no ads at all for some networks.
Users following invisible links are definitive bots but otherwise, the main idea is to verify the coherence of the headers, and verify if there is a difference between theoretical browser capabilities and reality.
The behaviour is not so important because advertising networks generally have frequency capping support per IP/UID.
It's very easy to distinguish two browsers, and the browsers that declare themselves "no tracking" are even easier to track in real-life scenario because their signature is very different.
Take two Safari iOS on the same 3G networks, it's very difficult to differentiate them, but take two Brave browsers and it's quite easy to track the user.
CasperJS/PhantomJS/Selenium bots are usually running with the default resolution and they leak some javascript properties like window._phantom, window.Buffer, window.emit or window.webdriver (selenium).
To add to what has been said in the other comments, even just a simple algorithme and stats can detect that. You don't even need a Machine Learning model. It's rare than someone clicks on ads, even more several times on the same one, and even more if it's several times every day. The behavior of the user will just look like an aberration on the chart with hundreds times more clicks than the next maximum.
Maybe I misinterpret, but this argumentation by you and some others that "this is easily detectable" is _exactly_ the good part.
* They want to ignore me? Mission accomplished
* They want to discard my clicks and subtract it from the payout? Mission accomplished
etc. in any case they are playing the game for me.
I think it's also worth noting that Iranians have no possibility of renouncing their Iranian citizenship. So even if they wanted to cut any possible connection to Iran, they will never be able to get rid off their citizenship.
Militarization of police is happening in Germany, as well:
* Police special forces (SEK which are organized on the state level unlike GSG9 which are state police) have switched from blue to military-like green/brown uniforms (which have no tactical value, but that's another discussion).
* Police in e.g. Berlin are changing their fully automatic weapons by phasing out the 9mm MP-5 and replacing it with 5.56x45 G36 assault rifles for "anti-terror defense" purposes.
* More and more police units are equipped with armored wheeled tanks.
* Peaceful left-wing demonstrations in some states are regularly "secured" by special forces equipped with tactical equipment including assault rifles, a clear intimidation tactic. SEK units aren't even being trained to handle demos.
* Crime statistics are recorded in bizarre ways to artificially inflate anti-police violence, which in turn forms the basis for police unions to demand stricter laws. For example, any attack on a single police man is counted as an attack against their whole unit, and suddenly one victim becomes 10 victims in the statistics.
What the grandparent meant, I'd think, is the difference in the round. H&K MP5 uses 9mm Luger, pistol ammunition with significantly lower energy, range and penetration than 5.56x45mm NATO. One of those is suitable for police work too, one is only suitable for military or hunting.
This matters in urban areas, in police work, in use by inexperienced shooters (pretty much any policeman except for specialized units by definition, unless they train in their spare time, which is… somewhat difficult in Germany).
5.56x45 absolutely is "military" and equipping 5.56x45 riffles to regular police units doing patrol duty in cities absolutely is "militarization".
> 3. I doubt that. Yes, there are water throwers that are highly armored, but that's nothing new, nor bad.
The emphasis of that statement was on "more". While such hardware is sometimes needed, and so are "militarized" police units, the scope is limited. If (I don't know, nor the scale of it; but neither seem you) more of such equipment is used, "militarization" certainly would seem appropriate term for it.
"Just" is the wrong word. With the latest legislation in place, witnesses can be forced to make statements to the police under threat of duress, including fines and jail time.
Call them what they are: a right-wing populist law-and-order party that is only active in the state of Bavaria, but terrorises the rest of Germany with their reactionary and regressive policies.
The Germans used metamphetamine during World War 2. They gave it nicknames Panzerschokolade ("tank chocolate"), Stuka-Tabletten ("Stuka tablets"), Herman-Göring-Pillen, or Flieger-Marzipan ("pilot's marzipan"). It was freely available under the brand name "Pervitin" until 1941. From then on, you needed a prescription in order to purchase it.
It's a pretty good read, mostly about the prevalence of Pervitin usage. I found it extremely worthwhile but drug discourse is my cup of tea- I tend to get a bit geeky about it.
Interesting detail: look at where they authors are working. This is military research. And I'm not surprised. The problem of having to keep soldiers alert during long phases of sleep deprivation has been around since the early days of modern warfare.
I can't find the link right now, but I remember reading a study (also funded by the military) about using sleep masks with ear plugs to improve the quality of soldier's sleep when they do have the opportunity of sleeping. Deployed soldiers frequently don't have the luxury of a regular sleep schedule. This study, combined with the other one, seems to be an effort to deal with the problems of sleep deprivation. Soldiers can get relatively good quality sleep when they can, and be alert when they must.
Yea, I think the 48 hr sleep deprivation is not applicable to most people. The task also is a kind of "vigilance" task. I don't know if it applies to any kind of productive thinking. They also studied chronic sleep deprivation, maybe that would be helpful for people.
Ironically, Go is a programming language where both an Oberon developer (Robert Griesemer) and the developer of the direct predecessor of C (Ken Thompson) directly took part in the language's inception.
C is primitive but powerful. Go is primitive and safe. I would classify the Wirth-family of languages as safe but powerful. It all comes down to power; Go was explicitly designed to enable armies of lesser code monkeys to work together without anyone getting hurt.
At least they're producing binaries, not claiming their "abstract web hardware" is "near native" when it takes 100MB of browser to say "hello, world!".
Because real languages allow creating your own abstractions to fill the gaps, Go doesn't. Witness the total lack of decent error handling and data structures; despite probably thousands of people trying their best from user code. It's the iPhone of programming languages.
