DailyDirt: We've Got The Droids You're Looking For...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Nov 2nd 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Software is getting better and better at mimicking human behavior on the internet. People are fooled every day by automated messages that seem like they come from actual humans, and sometimes real human messages are mistakenly thought to be composed by computers. Here are just a few more examples of internet bots getting smarter.

Software called Decaptcha is getting better at solving CAPTCHA challenges. Decaptcha can't foil CAPTCHAs from Google and reCAPTCHA, so it's not going to help digitize books (but maybe someday it will). [url]
Google's indexing spider, GoogleBot, can now execute AJAX or JavaScript to get into dynamic commenting systems from Facebook and Disqus. When GoogleBot achieves self-awareness, hopefully it won't judge the human race from what it's read in blog comments... [url]
Socialbots are infiltrating social networks and collecting as much personal information as they can, using fake accounts with attractive profile pictures to befriend unsuspecting people. If a man you've never met before suddenly gives you flowers... (or pokes you on Facebook) Guess what? It's probably spam or an ad for something. [url]
To discover more interesting robot-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

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Filed Under: ai, captcha, googlebot, recaptcha, social networks, software
Companies: disqus, facebook, google

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Jeffrey Nonken (profile), 3 Nov 2011 @ 9:53am

Googlebot achieving self-awareness: Funny coincidence, I only just re-read The Adolescence of P1 last week. A fun story (but based on '70s technology; be sure to tighten your disbelief suspenders).

Socialbots: Yeah. I've been seeing those in FB, OkCupid, Yahoo!, and now Tagged. I usually figure it out pretty quickly; why would a woman that young and attractive be interested in me? :)
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Michael Ho (profile), 3 Nov 2011 @ 10:19am

Re:
RE: Socialbots -- yah, the study used highly-rated "hotornot" pictures for profile photos -- so they'd just have to dial that back a bit to get some "less attractive" fake profiles. But the interesting part was that once one of your real friends gets fooled by a socialbot, you're more likely to accept the related friend request. So beware of bots with mutual friends (esp if those friends are gullible)....
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Medina, 12 Nov 2011 @ 11:21pm

For those person who don't have idea what is Googlebot, Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.
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