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Comment by jdnenej | Hacker News Reader

Would it be possible to just run 100 instances of an android emulator?

That part is addressed in the article.

> One farmer said they do sometimes virtualize phones on their PC, but due to how resource intensive that can be on the computer, it works out as more cost effective to have a selection of cheap phones instead.

And also it's pretty easy to detect.

Simply put: "It doesn't work like that." ™

Emulators would be immediately identifiable. This method can only work if the fraudstee has no fraud detection mechanism at all.

How though? With Bluestacks you can emulate a few different types of phones including Google Pixels.

I don't know. But I spent the better part of a day trying to prevent a game from detecting I was using an emulator.

Bluestacks in different configurations was among the things I tried.

Lost interest and decided the developers just don't want me as a potential customer.

For native apps blacklist default emulator MSIN and similar attributes (and let the cat and mouse game begin).

For mobile web various fingerprinting techniques are available. As a fun (and quite irrelevant) example, you can immediately tell chrome, safari, firefox and node apart just with:

  atob('Ψ')
  x

Depends what you’re emulating.

Instead of emulating the OS, you could emulate app by simulating the I/O network traffic.

PayTV pirates did this with smart cards: just replaced the entire thing with a chip that knew what to respond for each challenge/demand.

Everything is possible, and every measure has its counter. “Just replace the device with a chip that” is not in the same ballpark as “just use an emulator”.

I thought something along the same lines - fire up an old server and launch a couple hundred Android VMs. I doubt it'll even be that much expensive (if at all) compared to 100-200 phones drawing 5-10W each, or whatever devices of that size consume.

You need actual registered phone IDs

What sort of phone ID - ICCID or IMEI, or something else?

Should be trivial to scrape them off the Internet. Or buy them.

Don't android and iOS ban identifying the actual device and instead require an ad if which can be regenerated be used?

Phones can run full blast and charge with a 5w input.

With reduced screen brightness, I’d bet they’re at 2 or 3 watts per. That’s a few dollars a year for electricity, 24/7, per unit at 10c/kwh.

Would love to see some solar panel contraptions that switch between grid and solar, using whatever oomph the battery still has left.

Or virtual box with win or chromeos instanced. Easy peasy. (No, I don’t do this, but a fascinating problem space)

No, it doesn't work this way.

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