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Evan Boehs
@boehs.org

Windows 7 traffic on my site has dramatically increased over the past 3 months. This was widely reported in the news, and frequently attributed as a statscounter glitch. But I don't use statscounter, and my Windows 7 traffic is still increasing. Why? A thread;

0 reposts1 like

Evan Boehs
@boehs.org

Over 90% of my Windows 7 "visitors" are Chrome users in Singapore with no referrer and 1280x1200 displays. These users *do* execute JS, but do not engage with the page. They appear to visit pages at random. Unless my website is shockingly popular with Singaporean Windows 7 users, these are bots...

Evan Boehs
@boehs.org

But for what? They aren't DDoSing me, but they are executing JavaScript and evading my (admittedly lax) bot mitigations. Maybe they are stealing my copyrighted content to train an AI model.

Evan Boehs
@boehs.org

Maybe I block w7 users in Singapore. But I only identified this in the first place bc of the odd Windows 7 UA. What % of other visitors are bots? Not all, but some? Most? I can't detect them well, evidently. I don't know who's running them. And I don't want to fingerprint humans to find out.