Quartz: Your favorite Twitter bots are about die, thanks to upcoming rule changes. “Bots are one of the best parts of Twitter. If you’ve spent much time exploring the sprawling social-media platform, chances are you’ve followed at least a few of them. You might’ve followed @tinycarebot, for example, which periodically reminds you to breathe, go outside, or take a nap.”
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NiemanLab: Two-thirds of Americans have heard of bots, but many fewer think they can recognize them on social media
NiemanLab: Two-thirds of Americans have heard of bots, but many fewer think they can recognize them on social media. “Two-thirds of Americans have heard of social media bots. (Good!) Eighty percent of those say bots are mostly used with bad intentions, compared to 17 percent saying they’re used for good, according to a Pew Research Center survey out today. (Meh.) The survey was conducted among 4,581 respondents in the end of July and August, after those bot Tweets blew up.”
Boing Boing: US governmental requests for comment are routinely flooded by pro-corporate bots
Boing Boing: US governmental requests for comment are routinely flooded by pro-corporate bots. “Last year, the FCC was only able to ram through a repeal of Net Neutrality by refusing to reject the millions of comments sent by bots that used the stolen identities of regular internet users, dead people, and even sitting US Members of Congress. It turns out the FCC isn’t the only agency being flooded by bots during requests for comment — and it’s also not the only agency that doesn’t seem to give a shit about being astroturfed by bots using stolen identities to influence government policy in favor of corporate agencies.”
The Verge: Bot makers loved The Last Jedi discourse so much they decided to politically influence it
The Verge: Bot makers loved The Last Jedi discourse so much they decided to politically influence it. “When it arrived in theaters last year, writer-director Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi was greeted with an immediate backlash from a specific corner of its audience. As Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff pointed out in December, the criticism seemed to come from a few different angles: some felt the film was too progressive, that it was too jokey, that it was not interested in the elaborate universe of fan theories that has accreted since the original trilogy’s release, or that the characters’ journeys weren’t exactly to their liking.”
ZDNet: Gigantic 100,000-strong botnet used to hijack traffic meant for Brazilian banks
ZDNet: Gigantic 100,000-strong botnet used to hijack traffic meant for Brazilian banks. “Over 100,000 routers have had their DNS settings modified to redirect users to phishing pages. The redirection occurs only when users are trying to access e-banking pages for Brazilian banks. Around 88% of these routers are located in Brazil, and the campaign has been raging since at least mid-August when security firm Radware first spotted something strange.”
The Hacker News: Mirai Botnet Creators Helping FBI Fight Cybercrime to Stay Out of Jail
The Hacker News: Mirai Botnet Creators Helping FBI Fight Cybercrime to Stay Out of Jail. “Three young hackers who were sentenced late last year for creating and spreading the notorious Mirai botnet are now helping the FBI to investigate other “complex” cybercrime cases in return to avoid their lengthy prison terms.”
Wired: How Bots Ruined Clicktivism
Wired: How Bots Ruined Clicktivism. “The art of clicktivism—the use of social media to organize, support, or promote a cause—isn’t new, of course. For close to a decade now, activists and political organizations have used technology to capitalize on social ties and trust by turning friends into messaging amplifiers: Click to automatically email your member of Congress; click to share this funny video ad with your Facebook friends. But around the time of the US presidential election in 2016, it became apparent that fake people were also participating in clicktivism.”
