Weary PC gamer defends AMD's store from bots and gets a free T-shirt

Angry bot cant buy any more AMD GPUs, haha! — (Image credit: Pixabay - carvit56)

The state of PC building is tragic of late. Bots have been named as one reason it's so damn difficult to buy a GPU at the moment. With vulnerabilities still rampant in manufacturers online stores—AMD in particular has had problems containing the issue—it's no wonder there's still not enough graphics cards to go around.

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While that's not the entire story, we have to commend those working to overcome the onslaught of bots buying up all the GPUs at once.

One such helpful coder who exposed gaps in AMD's anti-bot measures, shared their story in a reddit post. They explain that, over three weeks of testing and code development, they were not only able to bypass the store's anti-bot measures—through some reverse-engineering on the web store—they also managed to expose the product's stock levels, too.

Thankfully they brought the vulnerability to AMDs attention, which has now been fixed, and in their post said "Hopefully that's one less vector for scalpers to buy GPUs using bots. Good luck to everyone for upcoming drops!" Comments like this point to their original intention being benign, so we hope they enjoy their free T-shirt from AMD for reporting the issue, when they could've just sold the code on.

Hopefully this should translate into some of us managing to bag a Radeon RX 6800 XT, or similar.

It's true retailers and manufacturers have been trying everything to alleviate the GPU stock crisis, including luring cryptocurrency miners away from gaming GPU stock with new mining focused cards, as well as adding manufacturing queues among a slew of other attempts. But, down at the basic supply level, there are still component shortages making it very difficult. With no components, you can't make GPUs. Simple as.

So, despite all the pushback, the GPU shortage is expected to continue for much of this year. Still, thankfully there are people out there fighting our corner and actually reporting vulnerabilities, as opposed to selling the code to hungry cryptocurrency miners.

Having been obsessed with game mechanics, computers and graphics for three decades, Katie took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni and has been writing about digital games, tabletop games and gaming technology for over five years since. She can be found facilitating board game design workshops and optimising everything in her path.