Fake GitHub Star 的生意

昨天在 Hacker News 首頁上看到「Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market (dagster.io)」這篇,原文在「Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery」這邊。

作者群想要偵測 GitHub 上面 fake star 的行為,所以就跑去找黑市買,然後找到了兩家,Baddhi Shop (1000 個 $64) 與 GitHub24 (每個 €0.85,大約是 $0.91),價錢差異很大,「品質」差異也很大:貴的 star 在一個月後還是存在,而便宜的看起來有一些有被 GitHub 偵測到而清除掉:

A month later, all 100 GitHub24 stars still stood, but only three-quarters of the fake Baddhi Shop stars remained. We suspect the rest were purged by GitHub’s integrity teams.

接下來就是想要系統化分析,切入點是 GH Archive 這個服務,可以直接下載 GitHub 全站上的 public evnets 資料:

GH Archive is a project to record the public GitHub timeline, archive it, and make it easily accessible for further analysis.

想要偵測兩種不同的 fake account,第一種是 obvious fake account,定義成這樣:

  • Created in 2022 or later
  • Followers <=1
  • Following <= 1
  • Public gists == 0
  • Public repos <=4
  • Email, hireable, bio, blog, and twitter username are empty
  • Star date == account creation date == account updated date

從定義就可以看出來完全就是灌水帳號,開出來就沒在動的。從 screenshot 可以看出這種帳號長的都一樣:

另外一種則是透過演算法去分析,這邊拿 unsupervised clustering 類的演算法分析出來的結果,可以看到抓到很多:

最近 NN 類的 machine learning 演算法太多,看到這些傳統的 machine learning 演算法還是覺得頗新鮮的...

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