# IRC Log Summary - July 30, 2012

* A discussion about click fraud revealed sophisticated bot techniques, including bots that simulate mouse movements with unnatural patterns (straight lines with acute corners) to bypass fraud detection systems.

* One participant described a distributed botnet click fraud operation that used hundreds of IPs worldwide performing slow clicks during daytime hours, which was only detected due to unusual click patterns compared to historical data.

* Transcriptic (a cloud laboratory startup) was mentioned as closing a $1M funding round, with approximately half already raised. Their protocols page was shared: https://www.transcriptic.com/about/protocols

* A conversation about Facebook advertising noted that a company was withdrawing from the platform after analytics showed 80% of ad clicks were from bots, raising questions about ad verification methods across platforms.

* Participants discussed various CAPTCHA-breaking techniques, noting that hiring humans to solve CAPTCHAs (through services like deathbycaptcha.com) is sometimes more cost-effective than programming automated solutions.

* A question was raised about home-based DIY biology/synthetic biology labs, though no specific recommendations were provided in the conversation.