152
Exposed: Chinese smartphone farms that run thousands of barebones mobes to do crime
(www.theregister.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
152 points (92.7% liked)
Technology
59340 readers
1457 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
This was always my idea, abuse "free money" apps where you watch ads for money en masse with automated swipes using apps like Smart Autoclicker and tadaaa! Free money.
Would be worse for the environment than mining Bitcoin though.
This story won't make your life better: As a broke twenty something, there was an app called SwagBucks (I just looked, it still exists). And you'd get paid for leaving the app up displaying ads. I don't know the state of Android emulators back then, so I bought ~12 cheap phones and left them on 24/7. Eventually, SwagBucks added an inactivity timer, so every 2 hours, I'd walk by the board of phones and tap them to keep going.
This all sounds incredibly stupid, but it was enough to pay for a fun Christmas. I think it was ~$500 in profit, after the cost of phones and electricity were accounted for. Payouts were Amazon giftcards.
I mean it is basically profit on the back of cheap smartphone labor and a lot of wasted electricity, but it works. The stupid amazon giftcards are a problem, you could sell them for anonymous paying though.