Mesa, AZ - Stats and Bots

Funny thing about blogging, you never know where your audience comes from. However, Google Blogger has a cool tool for statistics. And, one of the bits of information that it tells you is what country your readers come from. So, here’s the map of the world with my audience for yesterday. Look, I’ve got more readers yesterday from Russia than from any place else. Next comes America. I’ve even got readers form the Ukraine, from Germany, France, England, Canada and Kenya? Do I for a minute believe this? That I’ve got readers in Russia? Nope. I think they’ve got little bots that circle around the blogoshpere. They’re not reading my stuff, but they’re messing up my statistics.

So, what are ‘bots’? I had a general idea but not anything concrete. I can do some things with computers and have some knowledge but I had to learn about bots. They are automated programs that cruise the Internet trying out every site they can find. Kind of like rats on a ship looking for food although bots are much more prevalent and much more obscure. Lots of them and you can’t see them. OK, if the Internet is the information highway, bots are lots of cars careening around driven by mindless bandits. I’ve read that bots account for 56% of all website visits.

Now, I know that there are good bots along with the bad bots. The good bots are like Google which has to scurry around the Internet to find the right items for my search. Yahoo, the same. No bots, no search engines. But, there are malicious bots out there too. Spam bots, hacker bots.

John Pullen who covers everything tech for TIME magazine wrote this in May 28, 2015.

How Bad Bots Are Destroying The Internet
John Patrick Pullen @jppullen May 28, 2015

Last year was the first time in history that bots outnumbered people on the web. According to research from Distil Networks, almost 60% of 2014’s web traffic consisted of automated bits of code, 23% of which exist to do dirty work for fraudsters and hackers. “It’s getting worse,” says Rami Essaid, Distil’s CEO. “Over the past ten years, they went from just kind of being out there and easy to detect to being really, really sophisticated.”

Computer programs that have been coded to either automate a task or pretend to be a person, bots have probably been on the Internet longer than you have. They can be either good or bad. For instance, Facebook uses bots to grab the headline, first paragraph, and image from a story when you share it on your news feed. Meanwhile, Google uses bots to crawl and catalog the web so when you run a search, the site can deliver appropriate results.

But hackers also use bots for all sorts of nefarious reasons, from lifting credit card numbers from an online store to scraping the text off an article and posting it on some random blog. (The nerve!) In fact, digital publishers get hit hardest by bad bots, with almost one-third of the traffic crawling on sites like this being malicious programs. (Sorry about that.) Travel sites, online stores, and real estate pages also abound with comps-critters.

And, that’s what I think is from Russia on my blog. Bother the Bots. Get off my blog. What in the world do they think they might get from my blog? Do they think I have national secrets? Do they think I know the best place to eat in New York? Why me? I keep thinking I might just write a whole blog with the word ‘Russia’ in it and see how often they hit that. But, I don’t want to encourage them.

On another topic: our life is not always hiking or washing the RV or sitting around doing bookkeeping or what ever. Sometimes we actually get out into the world. A few days ago we spent the day out ‘shopping’, my favorite task. Since I’m calling it a ‘task’ you might guess that I’m no fan of shopping. Don’t like to shop. But, sometimes it’s necessary.

We hit REI to buy a new hiking shirt for Big Gar. He’s been getting by with the two he has but even he admits that he might need a 3rd. I’ve been trying to convince him of this for several years. We also bought a new bladder for our backpacks since mine leaks. I’m hiking along and I get drips of water on my legs.

And, here we are, in Costco, having lunch. Yeah, you might think that’s a very berry sundae but, it’s 12:00 pm, noon, and we’re having lunch.

THERE SHOULD BE A CALORIE REFUND FOR THOSE FOODS THAT DIDN’T TASTE AS GOOD AS YOU EXPECTED.

No calories back for this treat - it tasted as good as I expected and more.