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A comment on You are being followed: The business of social media surveillance. Parent comment

Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by hellbanner on Friday May 20, 2016 @08:17PM (#11742513)
Open-source shilling software would be interesting (and hilarious in a dark way).

But most every day people don't have the resources to pay for marketing & servers to run massive operations.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by xyzzy123 on Saturday May 21, 2016 @01:14AM (#11743308)
I agree; but the value in these tools is very transient based on cat-and-mouse.

For precisely this reason they become useless when open-sourced.

And on the other hand it's not like they're great works of art. They're weekend hacks driving a rest API or phantomjs. Most of the "art" is threading or concurrency and getting it all to go over a 4K line "free proxy" list without falling over too badly.

Want 10k Twitter accounts? It's not magic. It's just some dumb scripts and a bit of patience.

You don't need massive server power (a $5 droplet will do fine) but you do have to have a bunch of time to waste.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by chatmasta on Saturday May 21, 2016 @01:06PM (#11745329)
youtube-dl faces the same cat-and-mouse problem, but has sufficiently frequent commits to keep up with any changes.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by samstave on Friday May 20, 2016 @09:50PM (#11742792)
Are you familiar with this:

https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=289655

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by hellbanner on Saturday May 21, 2016 @08:46AM (#11744489)
No, what exactly am I looking at ?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by samstave on Sunday May 22, 2016 @11:41AM (#11748963)
Reddit founder trying to sell social manipulation services to the government
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:You are being followed: The business of social media surv... by hellbanner on Monday May 23, 2016 @11:53AM (#11754645)
Oh, that's amazing.
[ Parent | on HN ]