What if your computer could go on Amazon and send you a present every month without you knowing what it is. Pretty human, right? In Darius Kazemi’s case, that’s exactly what his “Random Shopper” does, all with a simple program you could do yourself.

He explained to Boing Boing that he loves randomness almost as much as he loves forgetting about a back-ordered product he bought on Amazon and then discovering it delivered to his doorstep weeks later. He said that it’s like a gift, and why not create something that could constantly gift him things without him knowing what they are.

So he set out to create the Random Shopper. It’s a computer program that chooses random products in Amazon’s books, movies, and music sections. It is hooked up to the Wordnik application programming interface, which gives it a random word to search. From there it chooses a product at random and then buy it. The Random Shopper has a preloaded gift card and is outfitted to order; enter shipping, billing, and payment information; and then send off a gift to Kazemi every so often until it runs out of money.

Kazemi says it’s a fairly simple program to set up, and though it is coded to send him random packages, he’s actually enjoys a majority of what it sends him. Thus far he has received a CD from Ákos Rózmann, which had music that sounded more like a “defective CD,” but he wound up liking it. It then sent him The Oxford History of World Cinema and Noam Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics.

He has received some criticism, however, from people saying he shouldn’t waste $50 or so dollars a month on random items.

Kazemi answered the criticisms on his Tumblr. ”The way I look at it is this: I’m spending $50 a month on art supplies. Some people might spend $50 a month on painting supplies: canvas, paint, brushes, etc. For me it’s a bit more abstract than that, but that’s what I’m doing.”

Robot gift image via Shutterstock

Zooming in on November and December 2012 it’s not hard to spot when Thanksgiving 2012 happened. Fully 1/5 of the attacks that CloudFlare saw in November and December (so far) happened on the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving:

In the past we’ve seen drops in DDoS attacks on some holidays because the home and office machines used as bots in those attacks have been turned off. For example, this year we noticed a large drop in attack activity on Earth Day (when people are encouraged to switch off their machines to save the planet). But this year’s Thanksgiving attack statistics indicate that plenty of hacked machines were online through the holiday.

But what does this tell us about the coming Christmas holiday period? To answer that we can look back to December 2011. CloudFlare has DDoS data for December 11, 2011 to January 1, 2012 which shows two distinct peaks of attack activity: one just before Christmas and one just after.

So, if 2011 is a guide DDoS attackers will be taking a few days off over Christmas, but will be keeping the pressure on just before and immediately after. That’s probably not a surprise as some fo the attackers will be attempting to disrupt businesses during critical periods for pre- and post-Christmas sales.

Even though there’s a Christmas lull, that doesn’t mean that CloudFlare staff will be letting down their guard, however. We’ll be here working to ensure that whenever attacks arise and from whereever we’re ready to absorb and deflect them.

John Graham-Cumming is the lead programmer at CloudFlare, the content delivery and security network. Prior to CloudFlare he worked at a number of startups and created the award-winning POPFile email machine learning software. He knows way too much about GNU Make having self-published a book entitled GNU Make Unleashed. He joined CloudFlare to take on the task of ‘patching the Internet.’

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

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Solve Media is trying to defeat bots in the advertising industry. It created a new type of advertising that makes people prove they are humans, and now the company is bringing together some well-known names in security to form the “Security Advisory Council.”

They aren’t exactly The Justice League — the group includes former notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick to cryptography expert Bruce Schneier — but they’re tasked with providing advice and research about fighting bots to the advertising community.

“Bots are basically the platform by which all the bad guys will [launch] their attacks … A bot infrastructure allows an attacker to hide their attack over a period of time,” said Sourcefire security architect Adam O’Donnell in an interview with VentureBeat, “We’re going to help quantify what the attack vectors are.”

The Security Advisory Council, which is rounded out by Chris Wysopal and Elad Yoran, will research bots and provide that information to the advertising community. Bots affect a much broader audience than simply advertising, but where there’s research, there’s the potential that you can find something that can help industries beyond your own. And, Solve Media chief executive Ari Jacoby is concerned, the advertising community isn’t doing enough anyway.

“It was shocking for us to see the huge wall between the security community and the advertising technology community,” said Jacoby in an interview with VentureBeat. “We specifically decided to put this council together because our peers are not having security conversations and they’re really, really important.”

Bots are often a string of computers which have a common virus on them. The virus allows a criminal to obtain control of the machine, using it to steal information and send it back to the hacker’s servers. In an online advertiser’s case, a bot can cost companies a lot of money by providing “fake” clicks.

The advertiser pays the host space money for every click on that advertiser’s ad. The hope is that one of those clicks will result in the purchase of that advertised product, or a sign-up for a service. If the click is fake, though, the advertiser is paying money for a customer who doesn’t exist.

Solve Media says bots cost advertisers up to $1.7 billion in wasted clicks. In order to fix this, Solve created its own advertising product: putting the advertisement wherever a CAPTCHA is. A CAPTCHA is one of those hard-to-read forms that make you write a word in a box to prove you’re a human before you, say, post a link to a website. In Solve Media’s CAPTCHA, instead of typing in a word, you type in the slogan or brand that is in the advertisement to prove you’re human.

Jacoby says the company is processing around five million CAPTCHAs every day.

Bots image via Shutterstock

Pretty Pet Salon debuted in the Apple iTunes App Store in January 2011. It generated more than 7 million downloads on iOS and later on Android. But on Jan. 12, it mysteriously disappeared from the App Store — and then it returned again in a different form at the end of March. Why this happened is an interesting tale.

The app, created by Hong Kong–based Animoca, a division of Outblaze Ventures, reportedly ran afoul of Apple because it violated an Apple policy that prohibits app creators from manipulating the top 25 rankings on the App Store. But Animoca says it did nothing wrong and it truly doesn’t understand why Apple banned it without explanation. [Read our investigative report on unaware developers caught in Apple's dragnet.]

Animoca admits that it used 25 different third-party marketing services. Some of these services may use bots, or fake users with fake iTunes accounts, to download apps in huge numbers and artificially inflate their rankings on the charts. Others use humans to do the same thing, downloading lots of games to fake accounts where the games are never used. Other services generate fake reviews. But it’s difficult for a company like Animoca to know whether its third-party marketing service is legitimately promoting an app or not. And Animoca’s own experience may very well scare legitimate developers away from doing anything that could be construed as risky — or innovative — in their marketing.

Developers want answers

Animoca and third-party marketers aren’t necessarily running from Apple’s enforcement. Rather, they just want to know what they did wrong. Ibrahim El-Mouelhy, a spokesman for Animoca, said, “We have never used bots or intentionally engaged in any manipulation activities.”

The manipulation of the App Store rankings was a big enough problem for Apple to issue a statement on Feb. 6. In a message on its developer page, Apple said, “Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

An Apple representative placed its first call to Animoca in early January. The caller talked to an Animoca representative whose first language was not English. Based on that conversation about “fake reviews,” the situation escalated. Animoca didn’t know what Apple was referring to and put the word out to its third-party marketing services to stop whatever they were doing. It didn’t actually know if they were doing anything wrong. But word got back to Apple, apparently, that Animoca had put this message out. This may have looked suspicious.

On Jan. 11, Animoca published a blog post about how the top charts on the App Store could be improved, simply by hiding the apps that a user already had installed. The next day, the company’s apps were removed.

Animoca acknowledged that it used third-party marketing service Gtekna, a two-person firm headed by chief executive Chang-Min Pak. Pak told us that his company only uses legitimate methods, including giving away gift cards, to help spread a game. Gtekna did change its website after Apple’s February statement so that it no longer guaranteed placement in the top 25 rankings. But Pak said his company has worked with thousands of app developers, and none of them has been banned, to his knowledge.

No one disputes that it’s important to get into the top 25 rankings, since the App Store isn’t great at helping apps gain notice among the sea of more than 600,000 active apps. The temporary boost from marketing services can be a godsend for app makers. Once on the charts, the apps receive more visibility and more downloads, and eventually, they gather enough momentum to live on their own, if they’re good enough to please consumers. Pushing an app up by promoting it to people is fair game, but pushing an app to people who have no intention of using it, or completely automating the process of app downloads, will get an app maker into trouble.

El-Mouelhy said that Apple’s communication to Animoca did not spell out why it was banned. An Apple spokesman told us it was for a violation of guideline 3.10, which says, “Developers who attempt to manipulate or cheat the user reviews or chart ranking in the App Store with fake or paid reviews, or any other inappropriate methods will be removed from the iOS Developer Program.” Beyond that, Apple declined comment.

“We made several attempts to understand why this happened and how to rectify it,” El-Mouelhy said. “We offered an all-expense paid trip to Apple to visit us in Hong Kong to review our books. Apple didn’t reply.”

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But in the battle between Apple’s police and the cheaters who employ automated bots or cheap Chinese labor to boost their rankings, some innocent startups are finding themselves banned from the marketplace — collateral damage in a high-stakes war with real money on the line.

Now a few of the castoffs are raising their voices to complain about Apple’s secretive policies.

“It’s hard to tell who is doing this ethically and who isn’t,” said one source familiar with the cheaters who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s hard to believe the big guys aren’t manipulating their ranks and that Apple is treating everybody fairly here.”

At issue is the cottage industry of third-party marketing firms that promise to propel unknown apps from obscurity to the top of Apple’s ranking charts. Sometimes their methods include brazen market manipulation using so-called “bot farms,” “software bots,” or human “water armies” in China — a practice that’s incurred the wrath of Apple’s policy cops in Cupertino, Calif. This February, Apple cracked down on a number of dubious marketing firms that use software bots and armies of human users to download apps en masse, propelling the titles to high-profile positioning within the App Store’s “Top Free” rankings chart.

Apple banned at least one major developer, Animoca (which published apps from Dream Cortex; read our separate report on Animoca being banned), from putting apps on the App Store because of alleged rankings manipulation. And we found that one app developer that used the marketer Gtekna saw unusual behavior; its app shot to the top 25 but then dropped like a rock, and 70 percent of the downloads were never opened.

One can’t blame Apple for trying to keep its App Store rankings pure, but some legitimately marketed apps might be getting swept up in Apple’s dragnet as the company attempts to remove software from those who would game the system. Similarly, some developers have pure intentions but have naively hired market manipulators. These developers are finding their apps blacklisted — and when they attempt to work with Apple on App Store reinstatement, their efforts are ignored. (Apple declined repeated attempts to talk to us for this story).

It isn’t clear how many apps have been affected by the bans, but in any given month, Apple takes down 5,000 apps for a variety of reasons, according to app search firm Xyologic. The developers’ concerns came at a time when overall App Store downloads were notably decreasing. Matthäus Krzykowski, the chief executive of Xyologic, said that the volume of downloads on the U.S. App Store has fallen 25 percent since January. The decrease, he says, can in part be attributed to Apple’s crackdown on bots and its decision to combat “incentivized” installs (which we’ll explain below). Fiksu, another app marketing firm, reports a similar drop in downloads on the App Store.

“We had an app rejected and we didn’t know why,” said an executive at a seasoned game development company who requested anonymity. “It would be much better if we had clear communication from Apple about what the guidelines really are. It seems like everyone is worried about this, but the information isn’t evenly circulated. People think that Apple plays favorites.”

The executive said most developers know about the manipulation tactics but will only talk about them in private. He said there’s a growing fear in the developer community that as more and more app companies use underhanded marketing techniques, the greater ecosystem will be forced to do so as well to keep up with rivals.

The words of the gaming company executive were echoed during a frank, closed-door discussion on app marketing at a recent mobile conference. Chief executives of affected companies — developers, ad networks, app marketers, and mobile infrastructure companies — all said that they were worried about Apple’s handling of the marketing crackdown, but nobody wanted to stand up and tell Apple what was wrong.

Since the download numbers have dropped since January, app developers and publishers have had to get more aggressive about marketing, said Joe Bayen, the chief executive of FreeAppADay, which uses Apple-approved methods to help market apps. “In the past, you might have only needed only three or four marketing services to spread an app,” Bayen said. “Now you might need to use 40 of them.”

Apple hasn’t said a lot about the crackdown beyond this Feb. 6 statement: “Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership.”

In February, after the Apple crackdown, some third-party marketing services such as AppMagenta went into hiding. This wasn’t the case with Gtekna, a small app marketing firm in Palo Alto, Calif., with only two employees. Rather than going underground, Gtekna changed the wording on its website so that it no longer promised to work App Store magic for developers.

Indeed, Gtekna’s web site no longer guarantees top 25 placement, but it proudly proclaims it can “Increase visibility and maximize sales!” It also notes somewhat cryptically that it does not use “bots.”

Gtekna’s top executive was willing to talk with us about the gray areas of rankings-driven app promotion — the points at which solid marketing tactics give way to shady market manipulation. We’ll share his story shortly. But let’s first delve into what happened when Apple started fighting back against shady app marketers.

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