In a blog post, hCaptcha announced that its bot detector is running on about 15% of the internet, adding they they “took most of this market share directly from Google reCAPTCHA.” From the post: Competing with Google and other Big Tech companies seems like a tall order: their monopolistic market power, platform effects and army of highly paid developers are generally…
Tag: bots
Walmart-exclusive Router and Others Sold on Amazon and eBay Contain Hidden Backdoors To Control Devices
Bernard Meyer, reporting for CyberNews: In a collaboration between CyberNews Sr. Information Security Researcher Mantas Sasnauskas and researchers James Clee and Roni Carta, suspicious backdoors have been discovered in a Chinese-made Jetstream router, sold exclusively at Walmart as their new line of “affordable” wifi routers. This backdoor would allow an attacker the ability to remotely control not only the routers, but…
Net Applications Will No Longer Track the Browser Wars
Emil Protalinski, reporting for VentureBeat: For more than a decade, I’ve used Net Applications’ NetMarketShare tool to track the desktop browser and operating system markets. The monthly reports have been critical in gauging which browsers and new versions of operating systems are gaining or losing market share. Last week, Net Applications released its final NetMarketShare report. The loss could not come…
Massive Criminal Trial Begins For ‘Cyberbunker’ Dark Web Server
The Times of London reports:
A gang of cyberexperts turned a former German military bunker into one of Europe’s biggest hubs for the “dark web” and a superhighway for at least a quarter of a million offences, including drug trafficking and the falsification of identity papers, a court has been told. Four people from the Netherlands, three Germans and a Bulgarian are…
Bot Generated Fake Nudes of Over 100,000 Women Without Their Knowledge, Says Report
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Around 104,852 women had their photos uploaded to a bot, on the WhatsApp-like text messaging app Telegram, which were then used to generate computer-generated fake nudes of them without their knowledge or consent, researchers revealed on Tuesday. These so-called “deepfake” images were created by an ecosystem of bots on the messaging app Telegram…
Software Engineer Catches Intelligent Bot Posting on Reddit
“The posts were appearing at a rate of about one per minute, and the posts were lengthy, most around six paragraphs long…” writes software engineer Philip Winston. I read through some of the posts. The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago. However there were some flaws and tells that suggested they were…
How Robots, Some Autonomous, Are Helping Our Response to COVID-19
“To fight a disease that thrives on human contact, robots have increasingly taken the place of vulnerable humans,” writes Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle: Sentry robots have performed screenings and patrolled streets, looking for lockdown violators. Avatars have allowed family members to visit loved ones in senior homes and enabled graduating students to walk across the stage. In hospitals, germ zappers have blasted…
The World’s Largest Concentrations of Java Programmers are in Asia and Germany
“To celebrate Java’s 25th anniversary this year and the latest release of Java 15, JetBrains has compiled data from multiple sources to look at what the current state of the language,” reports
SD Times: The largest concentration of Java developers is in Asia, where 2.5 million developers use it as their primary language. JetBrains believes this may be due to the fact…
US Teens Are Being Paid to Spread Disinformation on Social Media
The Washington Post covered “a sprawling yet secretive campaign that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia” during America’s last presidential campaign in 2016. According to four people with knowledge of the effort, “Teenagers, some of them minors, are being paid to pump out the messages…”…
A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation
Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News. From the report: The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples…