The truth is, Pablo Banila never really visited every website where his avatar appeared—his bots did. An anonymous reader who identified himself as a retired hacker explained, “Pablo Banila actually is a programmer who uses a program called ‘web crawler.’ Web crawlers were originally used by search engines such as Google and Yahoo to automatically browse web pages on the internet. [This is done so they can] save the data on their database and make an index list of the web pages on the Internet.”

The reader added, “This is all done using a program. A program with a standard DSL connection can browse 10 sites every second, 600 sites every minute and 36,000 sites every hour—roughly 864,000 Multiply sites every day.”

Bianca Consunj