An AI company... They used to manually change system event logs to show it wasn't their software that caused the downtime for our clients.
Bought over a million dollars worth hardware (25% of which didn't even got racked), over 200 46inch LED screens that no one used, and very expensive offices at posh locations in the bid to increase its IPO valuation.
I've always been wondering to what degree are logs accurate, or rather believable as presented.
Such as when it comes to affiliate marketing, or ads. How can I, as a customer, know the numbers Amazon or Google about how many people used my link / seen my ad, aren't full of shit?
Its been a decade since ive done cpa marketing but we used invisible tracking pixels to cross reference how many ads have been viewed and click through rates but ya they can wash the ads with junk traffic.
You can monitor your site traffic during the ad campaign and see if it goes up by a reasonable rate per impression though?
Sure I suppose they could lie and you happen to have such a well crafted ad that it has a super high click rate and you are getting scammed but I think that is highly unlikely. Especially depending on your target it would be easy to check.
You can tell if it went up, but can you tell if it went up by a million views or two million?
Now yes I know metrics exist for this. But all those metrics are written based on data that's predominantly from a few of these large companies, and so expectations can be skewed.
Maybe Google has at least some competition in ads, even if nobody can touch that amount, but I can't see how you could reliably tell if Amazon isn't skimming your affiliate clicks.
Also, this unicorn that rhymes with Infinity, has all it's database service accounts with.... Drum roll.... "Password1". And most of the other secret service accounts and the passwords reside on company wide accessible Atlassian Confluence.
Pro tip: "Password1!" has a capital letter, a number, and punctuation, making it "totally 110% secure (tm)" according to the usual password complexity rules.