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.
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.