Darius Kazemi: There’s a common belief that Twitter accounts with usernames like @jsmith12345678 must be bots, or trolls, or otherwise nefarious actors. The thing is, since at least as far back as December 2017, the Twitter signup process has not allowed you to choose your own username! It instead gives you a name based on your first and last name, plus…
Tag: bots
How App Developers Manipulate Your Mood To Boost Ranking?
Higher ratings are the ‘lifeblood’ of the smartphone app world but what if they are inflated? From a report: Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. “Enjoying Skype?” a prompt will ask, and you click on a 1-5 star rating. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little thought to their fleeting whim. Behind the scenes, though,…
A Quarter of the Alexa Top 10K Websites Are Using Browser Fingerprinting Scripts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A browser fingerprinting script is a piece of JavaScript code that runs inside a web page and works by testing for the presence of certain browser features. In an academic paper published earlier this month, a team of academics from the University of Iowa, Mozilla, and the University of California, Davis, has analyzed…
Amazon’s Engineers Are Building Robots In Their Garages
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The next generation of Amazon’s Scout bots — the fully-electric autonomous delivery devices the company is hoping to deploy soon — is currently being designed and built by a team of mechanical engineers in Seattle, and not in the most orthodox of settings. Instead of working in sleek labs, Amazon’s engineers have effectively…
CBS’ Overzealous Copyright Bots HIt Star Trek Virtual Comic-Con Panel
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: San Diego Comic-Con — like just about every large conference, convention, and gathering in 2020 — has had to switch to an online-only virtual format this year due to the continuing pandemic. Media companies that usually have a large presence at events like SDCC worked hard to create streaming alternative content –…
Microsoft Teams Opens Its Doors To Third-Party Apps During Meetings
Microsoft is allowing third-party app developers to integrate into the Microsoft Teams meeting experience for the first time. The Verge reports: The new developer-focused features will let apps integrate into Teams meetings during video calls, and even before and after meetings. Third-party apps will be able to display content during Microsoft Teams calls, and even display notifications during calls. It’s a…
Google Steers Users To YouTube Over Rivals
A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Google gives its online video service YouTube the advantage when choosing the best video clips to promote from around the web. From the report: Take a clip of basketball star Zion Williamson that the National Basketball Association posted online in January, when he made his highly anticipated pro debut. The clip was popular on…
Who Is the Mystery Shopper Leaving Behind Thousands of Online Shopping Carts?
A Google crawler has been adding products to e-commerce site shopping carts, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. From a write-up: Sellers have been complaining about a serial cart abandoner named, John Smith. Turns out John is a Google bot. A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that it built systems to ensure the pricing seen on the product…
Bots Still Trying To Reach Cyberbunker 2.0 Addresses 9 Months After Raid
Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: In September last year, German police raided what was known as “Cyberbunker 2.0”, a former cold war nuclear bunker turned into a “bulletproof” hosting facility. A student of the internet security-training company SANS Technology Institute analyzed traffic reaching out for the former Cyberbunker’s IP address space. Over two weeks, thousands of bots called “home” still looking…
On Facebook and YouTube, Classical Musicians Are Getting Blocked or Muted
Michael Andor Brodeur, writing for The Washington Post: As covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the Internet, they’re having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots. Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings. You’ve encountered these…