LOTSA BOTS

I have a rough idea of how many people read this blog. Some receive updates either from me or Blogger itself. Many of those readers forward certain pieces, usually involving politics, culture, or movies to friends who might enjoy them. And I can tell when the friends forward them to others. 

Once in a while there's a spike when either a piece really hits home, or a bunch of bots try to leave a comment without bypassing the "prove you're a human" page. But in the past week, my review of the 1958 drama Cop Hater, published five years ago, appears to have caught on in an alarming way, as this graph shows:

In the early hours of July 17, Cop Hater bounced from zero (where it had been for three weeks) to 250 and stayed in that general area for the next five days. As I write this (July 23, 1:00 P.M.), it's currently at 75. The total number -- 1,220,000 -- is primarily from that time frame.

Yeah, I wouldn't trust this crew.

No other piece has seen this happen during those five days. When similar weird spikes happened many years ago, they coincided with a rise in readers bots from Hong Kong, Russia, and a few Eastern European countries. This week, the majority of hits --35% -- have come from the U.S., followed by Singapore at 17%. The other countries are in the single digits. 

Is it possible all these Cop Hater hits are coming from Singapore? Well,
Singapore Business Review reports that bots account for 50.4% of internet traffic in that country. Of that amount, 45% are "malicious".  That sounded like Singapore would be the likely source, although note the phrase "in that country" rather than "from". 

A little more nosing around brought me to a recently published piece from something called SUURV, which in itself sounded pretty sus. But the headline definitely was the real deal:

Aha! Those Singaporeans were the culprits after all! You can read the how and whys here if you're interested (and if you, too, have noticed a sudden interest from a country you have never thought of without the word "Sling" following it). 

The SUURV columnist gives some helpful advice on how to stop the Singapore bot numbers from showing up on the blog, but I'm not likely not follow it. Not only do I not understand what he's talking about, I get a kick out of seeing how some mindless bots are trying to convince me to do whatever it is they want me to do.

But this leaves a very important question: Of all the movies that could have been chosen as their prime target, why Cop Hater? What was wrong with Ingagi, Myrt and Marge, or I Am Suzanne! 

To you it's for exercise. To the police in
Singapore, it's advice not to commit 
another crime.

Well, plenty, I suppose, but that's not the point. Something about Cop Hater -- or the title -- drew the attention of these bots or their programmers. Maybe even the police force itself. There's a site devoted entirely to three countries that use corporal punishment with a rotan for certain crimes -- in Singapore's case, 47 of them.                                                             Sounds like nasty business, to be sure, but Singapore also has one of the world's lowest cases of violent crime, to quote the site, "partly no doubt because the authorities have managed to make the island almost entirely gun-free" (not to mention gum-free, also!).

The weapon so nice, he named it twice.

Weigh the choice. In exchange for getting rid of guns, and thus having a very low rate of violent crime in return, would you be good with your local police force using what James Brown called a licking stick?                                                                          But we're getting off topic. Why Cop Hater? Who's responsible? And will Kash Patel come for me after his next bender?                   

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