Developing free and open source software can be a thankless experience. Most folks do it because it’s something they’re passionate about, with the only personal benefit being the knowledge that there are individuals out there who found your work useful enough to download and install. So imagine how you’d feel if it turns out somebody was playing around with the figures, and the steady growth in the number of installs you thought your software had turned out to be fake.
That’s what happened just a few days ago to OctoPrint developer [Gina Häußge]. Although there’s no question that her software for remotely controlling and monitoring 3D printers is immensely popular within the community, the fact remains that the numbers she’s been using to help quantify that popularity have been tampered with by an outside party. She’s pissed, and has every right to be.
[Gina] discovered this manipulation on June 26th after taking a look at the publicly available usage stats on data.octoprint.org. She noticed that an unusually high number of instances appeared to be running an old OctoPrint release, and upon closer inspection, realized what she was actually seeing was a stream of bogus data that was designed to trick the stat counter. Rolling back the data, she was able to find out this spam campaign has been going on since late 2022. Tens of thousands of the users she thought she’d gained over the last two years were in fact nothing more than ..
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