I don't know. I work at a cyber security company and the traffic to our site dropped by 58% overnight.
This entire experience has soured me a bit on Lemmy. There were a flurry of excited posts about the massive drop that totally happened. Every article I read refrained from presenting any evidence, and all used waffling text that sounded like it was all coming from other sources that didn't have any proof. It didn't help that Zalenskyy seemed to explicitly say that there was a massive drop - and that sucks, because I tend to generally believe what Ukraine says. I know they're in wartime and every government lies to some degree, but they generally seemed to be truthful for the most part.
So when I tried pointing this out in places, I got massive pushback - "No no, there's totally been a massive drop!" Where? Where's the drop? Where's the numbers from someone doing actual measurements? No answers, just downvotes.
I see this time and time again - often where it's probably less important, like people misread things and decide it means one thing when it doesn't mean that thing - and usually, the thing is bad, so the fact that they completely misread it is probably not so bad, except that it means nobody is caring about the truth.
For example, the Vance couch thing bothers me. There's plenty to string fascists up from trees for, but that couch thing was a joke in a book. So of all the legitimate things we can hate him for and joke about, that is a lie - a lie when it was taken as truth; originally a joke that became a lie when it was taken as truth.
We really don't need to come up with bullshit to be angry. All it does is makes us susceptible to more lies. How much of what I believe is a lie? How much is just flatly incorrect because people keep repeating it as true and I've also fallen for it? I'm not immune.
It's a serious problem everywhere, but Lemmy is small enough and generally progressive enough that it stands out because I EXPECT that fascists to lie. I would expect better from us. (And we aren't as bad, but the amount of misinformation that is vibe-upvoted is insane)
edit: The only thing that makes me happy is that this article is getting upvotes, so there is some hope, at least.
Literally everyone is susceptible to propaganda. Mostly all the old philosophers agree on one thing, you should be able to put down, entirely, everything you believe, so as to test you haven't fallen for propaganda. Even those dudes fell for propaganda and realised they needed to continually self check.
Welcome to humanity. The minority of “misinformation” we come across on the internet isn’t malicious, it comes from misunderstandings, jumping to conclusions, and hearsay. It’s existed before social media. I surf a lot of the “old web” and my latest find is a website that was telling me that a mummy was on the titanic, and it led to the sinking.
Subjectively, I commented on how calm and pleasant a couple of my social medias had been before reading the news about 14 hours after the strike.
THANK YOU. I have been saying this too. Thankfully those comments weren't immediately obliterated so there are more sensible people still. But to your point, just because you want to believe something that doesn't mean it's real.
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.
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.
I’ve blocked my cameras and TV from reaching the wider web.
Is there a tool I can use to monitor my home network for this sort of thing?
Wireshark will give you deep infomation about any network traffic.
Hmm. That seems to be the big gun. And something that will require analysis.
I was hoping for something intended for just this purpose.
I would be looking at what tools opnsense provides. opnsense is a firewall operating system, its most effective to put it between your appliances and the internet. but some if its tools could also be used standalone
A proxy only routes traffic while the cpu cycles are happening elsewhere, allegedly, the data center that went offline.
Your argument only makes sense if those proxies are more than just routing network packets but also hosting the actual code of those bots. Oh, and you'd also need to assume there's no c&c, the bots should be autonomous. Else there's the single point of failure. If there's a c&c then they can all go offline with a strike.
Exactly. Those smart TVs can be used as proxy to get around IP bans, but they can't run LLMs on their own to generate social media posts. They can't coordinate DoS attacks, only play a part in them.
The empirical data shows a big decline in Russian bot activity overall. You see it on Twitter already. The strikes took down web crawlers and we saw that graph go down, but the spin of it was all just crawlers falls short of actually explaining a lot of what we're seeing now. The 'Amazon' of Russia, probably didn't keep any kind-of graph to show how their social media twitter bots are running public facing. Now the lie that it was all web crawlers has done it's lap, and we're all going to argue about this a little while longer.
I like how Musk's Star Link cut off their service in retaliation over... Web crawlers?
Or diesel prices before the midterm elections.
How is it a lie? Do we have actual evidence that Russian bots went down?
tl;dr the "bots" were web crawlers, not social media accounts. And there's no evidence that disinformation campaigns saw any change at all.
And notably, most of the actual news articles, even from the start, admitted that there wasn't any proof if you actually read the articles. They were all "People are saying there's a drop!" but farther down it was all "There's no evidence it's happening, but people are saying!!!!!"
One European Parliament MP said something, everyone else just went with it, Zelensky then doubled down and apparently that was good enough. It soured me on some publications for sure.
No, there is no evidence and the graphs were just Yandex search crawlers. Yet there are numerous anecdotes about far right accounts getting substantially less amplification and engagement in the aftermath. That could be just a mirage but it could be more than that. That would warrant a proper statistical investigation at some point. After all, the question if Yandex servers host parts of the Russian psyop system is a valid one, that won't be clarified by either misleading graphs, anecdotal stories or stories about how it was absolutely nothing, without offering any evidence for that either. Those big data centres were, from what I have read hardly just doing web crawler stuff.
Yeah I mean just because there's no evidence doesn't mean it's not true, of course. But also there are potentially psychological explanations for this.
Why did Musk cut Ukraine off from star link over web crawlers?
I think he cut them off because Donny wanted it over Ukraine not wanting to be in on his super cool “deal”.
Timing is sus
We were shown a graph and given a story, you've internalized it and spread it to others. I don't that narrative because the evidence doesn't play it out.
The second problem, however, was that the ultra-specific claims about less activity in certain areas—MAGA, pro-Kremlin bot accounts, and AfD—had absolutely no basis in fact.
“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.
Emphasis added.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." — George Orwell.
first comments I saw in the article was people here saying. did we see a reduction? I think because it did not feel like it especially with the increase with the election coming soon.
Can you please provide evidence that shows that AfD engagement and traffic was not out of the ordinary during the start of the blackout? I am not saying that this was or wasn't the case but I haven't seen any evidence yet either way. So which evidence am I supposed to reject for the party?
I was arguing this point during the initial wave of suppositions by people just repeating vibes.
I feel like this really shows a certain flavor of social media bullshit very clearly.
Just wish we could destroy Israeli data centres.. Russia is terrible but Israel is the new actually real Nazis
You know what nobody in the news even mentions or talks about? The fact that multiple big AI "competitors" went offline at the same time a while back...
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
