The PC homebrewing situation is dire these days. Bots have been named as one of the reasons why it is so difficult to purchase a GPU today. Vulnerabilities are still prevalent in various manufacturers' online stores, and AMD in particular is having a hard time containing the problem.

This is not all, but one has to commend those who are trying to overcome the onslaught of bots buying up GPUs one at a time.

One such helpful coder who exposed a gap in AMD's bot protection shared their story in a reddit post. They explained that three weeks of testing and code development allowed them to not only bypass the store's anti-bot measures by reverse engineering the web store, but also reveal product inventory levels.

Thankfully, they brought the vulnerability to AMD's attention and it has now been fixed, and in their post they wrote: "Hopefully one less vector for duffers using bots to buy GPUs. Good luck with your future drops, folks! Comments like this show that their original intentions were good, and we hope they enjoy their free t-shirts from AMD for reporting the issue, when they could have just sold them the code.

Hopefully some of us will get a Radeon RX 6800 XT or something close.

It is true that retailers and manufacturers are trying everything to ease the GPU inventory crisis, including luring cryptocurrency miners away from their gaming GPU inventory with new mining-specific cards and adding manufacturing queues among many other attempts. At the basic supply level, however, the situation is very difficult due to ongoing component shortages. If you don't have the parts, you can't make the GPU. It's that simple.

So despite all the pushback, the GPU shortage is expected to continue for most of this year. Still, thankfully, there are those who will fight our corner and actually report vulnerabilities, as opposed to selling code to hungry cryptocurrency miners.