The bots are everywhere. If you run a server, you can see thousands of botnet scanning and hitting your server every seconds. They are like little criminals that go to every houses at night to pick locks. Be very careful what info you put out in Internet these days. Your opinions, documents, and images would be collected and edited to suit the bot's owners agenda.

For example, Chinese bots originated from China's main network has been hitting my server every seconds since this server is located in the US. When the US put out tariffs back in April, literally gazillion of Chinese bots were hitting US servers to extract product infos and prices.

Also, these bots are also known to spoof your identity. Your emails better come from services that use SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set to reject. Else, the bots would send mass of emails pretending to be you. VPN is useless too since that VPN servers are leaking your data out and used by the bots themselves. Internet is a great thing but is also a very dark place.

As for forums using bots to inflate member counts and create fake activities, this scheme is obviously done to fool sponsors. Only fools would post in forum with ads. Commercial forum uses your data for profit.

It's scary all those bots up to no good. I see so many "guests" trying to gather info from the forum.

Luzifer said:

It's scary all those bots up to no good. I see so many "guests" trying to gather info from the forum.

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The number of bots detected by the software installed in this forum represents about 5% of the totals. The rest of 95% appeared in firewall logs (server). When this forum grows with tons of real members, I will permanently ban the bots using my special firewall

Look at this…

Forafrank….

Looks like a bot posted and a bot answered. Next they will start high fiving each other while mining your data for training. There goes your privacy. Not only is your data being collected and leaked, it is also being used to teach the bots without your permission.

This forum, however, has no bots and they cannot scan it because the content is viewable only by members.

Rampante21 said:

Look at this…

Forafrank….

View attachment 696

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Those places has tens of thousands of fake members. Now it's getting to a point where you cannot trust an answer because it may be a bot. Someone asks a question about a defective shock absorber for their car and the bot will spew out auto leveling gibberish. The bot copied some text from a concrete website about auto leveling cement and post it on the car forum laying out false information.

I wouldn't be surprised if those forums added all these bots.

So a bot replied to someone asking about the Huracan engine cover, the bot falsely replied it was poly carbonate but actually it's glass. The beginning of bots spreading misinformation is here.

Luzifer said:

So a bot replied to someone asking about the Huracan engine cover, the bot falsely replied it was poly carbonate but actually it's glass. The beginning of bots spreading misinformation is here.

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The aftermarket one is made from PC and looks horrible. Yep, the original one is made from glass.

These bots created fake accounts so that they can freely scan and crawl forums for their database and training. Bot crawlers are constantly scanning this forum too, but we already know how to deal with them with our secret purgatory /wink /wink.

Luzifer said:

So a bot replied to someone asking about the Huracan engine cover, the bot falsely replied it was poly carbonate but actually it's glass. The beginning of bots spreading misinformation is here.

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Yea, I saw that one too. And more and more of the original members are seen more seldom on the site... A bit sad if you ask me.

Rampante21 said:

Yea, I saw that one too. And more and more of the original members are seen more seldom on the site... A bit sad if you ask me.

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If you notice the majority of people don't seem to want to make friends on these forums. They give out comments to no one in particular. There's very little friendly interaction, like a two person conversation. Some post a lot and it feels like they are talking alone. No one asks the other guy how they are doing for example. No one thanks another guy for good advice either.

If you took away all the bots and the fake posts the activity would be greatly reduced.

This week a manager at a local shop I know phoned me, he had done a business search on chat GPT and it recommended me. He sent me a screenshot, I was astounded 90% of it was false, it took excerpts from different businesses to grift onto mine with some services I did not offer, random pictures I do not have on my website and prices out of nowhere!

In my line of business, AI is everywhere nowadays. Fullblown hacker attacks from even foreign states are running close to 100% on AI-attacks now. There's AI built into many tools on both the offensive and the defensive side, and obviously also on both the right and the wrong side of the laws...

Luzifer said:

This week a manager at a local shop I know phoned me, he had done a business search on chat GPT and it recommended me. He sent me a screenshot, I was astounded 90% of it was false, it took excerpts from different businesses to grift onto mine with some services I did not offer, random pictures I do not have on my website and prices out of nowhere!

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AI obtains their data like google. They scan the Internet for their database. The problem is, they have no idea which information is accurate or not. If someone put out a live website with Luzifer as a Russian mob running oil tankers in Russia with a dozen of beautiful Russian wives then the AI will take that information into their database and recommended that.

Rampante21 said:

In my line of business, AI is everywhere nowadays. Fullblown hacker attacks from even foreign states are running close to 100% on AI-attacks now. There's AI built into many tools on both the offensive and the defensive side, and obviously also on both the right and the wrong side of the laws...

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The most annoying thing I got is when my customers used AI to fix their email sentences. I could see the patterns easily such as presence of many dashes to connect run-on sentences, grammars that you don't typically used daily, and use of too many jargons that a normal person would never use in any meetings or conversations. It's hard to understand what they are trying to say when it feels like I'm reading novel every time.