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How Does This Work?

You create a free account and set a Gmail filter to forward your Ingress email damage reports.

The damage reports are processed in realtime into the Outgress analytics and alerting engine.

That's the short version.

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We believe so, but you decide.

But My Secret Data!

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Spoofer Alerts

Discussion in 'Feature Requests' started by sarahk, Apr 9, 2017.

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  1. sarahk

    sarahk Member Illuminator Explorer Enlightened L13

    Our local Res aren't keen on Outgress and they're the primary target of spoofers in NZ but it would be neat if there was some sort of check that could be done on an agent to see if the travel between portals was "likely". To reduce server load you might only run it when the page is requested or if the user actively requests the check.

    Example: https://outgress.com/agents/Agent_3738040/
    Travelling time between the portals is 2 hours but the hike would be another hour at least.

    upload_2017-4-10_12-52-36.png

    and it would definitely take more than 4 minutes to get to these two.

    upload_2017-4-10_12-53-37.png

    Then there's this guy, hard to estimate the time between portals but he's a brilliant athlete! I've run them, in that order, and it took me longer than that.
    https://outgress.com/agents/Agent_5897006/
     
    sarahk, Apr 9, 2017
    #1
  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    Well... there are a few issues here:
    • Google's driving direction API only allows 2,500 calls per day. And about half of that is already being used for people getting driving direction from their location to a portal.
    • Even if the API usage was unlimited it couldn't be realtime just because of the volume of incoming data and the server resources required.
    • How would the system know if it's a drive, hike or bike between two portals?
    • Probably not a good idea to start labeling players as spoofers/cheaters automatically. There are cases where players use helicopters to get portals. Do we start labeling all these players as cheaters?
    If the system is purely "on demand" (no other way with the API issues), couldn't someone just as easily do it on demand themselves outside of Outgress (and they probably have insight as to if it's a hike vs a drive)? It also seems to me that an agent name of Agent _* has a pretty high probability of being a spoofer without even checking anything.

    Let's say Outgress did label someone a spoofer (even if it was correct)... then what? Outgress can't take action, and you will end up with people taking screenshots of Outgress saying someone is a spoofer and submitting that on a ticket to Niantic, which is going to mean zero to Niantic. If someone submitted the actual travel distance and stuff shown in Google Maps, that's going to be far more useful on a ticket vs. some random site that labeled someone as a spoofer.

    It would be far more useful as a tool to Niantic when investigating spoofer reports, and I suspect they already have such a tool at their disposal which has access to 100% of the actions performs by a player in-game (down to even picking up or dropping gear and who they got it from/gave it to).
     
    digitalpoint, Apr 10, 2017
    #2
    sarahk and Mustelidae like this.
  3. sarahk

    sarahk Member Illuminator Explorer Enlightened L13

    I'm not nearly enough of a maths nerd to know how this works, but with all the talk of machine learning I'd expect Niantic to be able to classify users into various distinct types - the walkers, cyclists, the car-gressers etc and you would see a pattern of behaviour around how they play and they wouldn't really deviate from it.

    I suspect that the spoofers stand out because they
    • consistently ignore portals that are in range even though they aren't speed locked
    • consistently get altitude wrong - yes there are planes & I've done a capsule swap parked under a crane so the crane operator could give me gear - but the rest of the time they'd be at a normal altitude
    • turn up at a portal and then open their scanner - every time
    • start glyphing very early in their ingress life and rely on glyphing for the majority of their AP
    • consistently acquire an odd combination of badges
      upload_2017-4-21_18-53-24.png
    • Use vanilla Agent_ usernames
    • Probably get their username on the first attempt - unlike my husband who tried quite a few and was outraged that Maxwell Smart had already been taken. It took me a couple of goes to accept that my preferred username was taken.
    We all probably would trigger a few of those occasionally but that's where the trend analysis comes in. For every time we get one of those wrong, we do it right 99 times. The spoofers won't be.

    Since I posted this it's interesting to note that our spoofers are allowing for travelling time. What they failed to allow for, in the last batch, was hiking time in the middle of a storm that had people warned not to make unnecessary trips and to ensure they had emergency supplies. Very little ingressing happened that day but the spoofers went hiking, apparently.
     
    sarahk, Apr 21, 2017
    #3
  4. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    Yeah, there's no doubt they could do more on their end with machine learning and other stuff. But they also are a business and simply have to prioritize resources. At the moment, I suspect it's crunch time to get "Ingress 2.0" out.
     
    digitalpoint, Apr 21, 2017
    #4
  5. sarahk

    sarahk Member Illuminator Explorer Enlightened L13

    Any chance we could search on this:

    upload_2017-4-23_14-30-9.png

    Unless they're hitting one of your portals they don't show up in comms.
     
    sarahk, Apr 22, 2017
    #5
  6. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Administrator Staff Member Illuminator Enlightened L15

    There are some internal issues with the auto-complete function there with non-alpha characters (punctuation and numbers), but you can still get to the agents profile direct at the URL /agent/Agent_xxxxxxx/
     
    digitalpoint, Apr 22, 2017
    #6
  7. sarahk

    sarahk Member Illuminator Explorer Enlightened L13

    I'm more thinking I'd like to see the info you have from the last 24 hours on any agent with an Agent_ name. Filter by country would be nice or just have the sliding scale like you do on https://outgress.com/agents/
     
    sarahk, Apr 26, 2017
    #7