http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=270000


in reply to Re: Stream of Consciousness
in thread Stream of Consciousness

How can they tell if it's an automated request?

"Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative" -Unknown

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Re: Re: Re: Stream of Consciousness
by chunlou (Curate) on Jun 29, 2003 at 18:02 UTC
    By pattern. A human being probably won't be submitting requests at the exact same interval for a long series of requests. Or he won't be submitting requests for 48 hours straight, or every 2 ms. In other words, human requests should have less regularity and volumn.
Re: Re: Re: Stream of Consciousness
by gjb (Vicar) on Jun 29, 2003 at 18:38 UTC

    It was probably mostly the volume since I had a random number generator for intervals (not to disguise, just out of courtesy). It was not exactly a lot of traffic (compared to what they receive anyway, but it must have been too long and (still) too regular.

    Oh well, best regards, -gjb-

      Automated requests may lack browser identification as well (if request to webpage, not web service).

      Of course, a best randomized disguise would be randomizing across internet domains but that won't be practical for most (law-abiding) people. Temporal randomization might not mean much if the time interval is too short, especially when shorter than the sampling intervals in which the series are analyzed.