bots
The Discord gaming community boasts 150 million members and 46 million active monthly users, who spend their days chatting about games, finding people to play with and looking for advice…
A team of researchers at Duo Security has unearthed a sophisticated botnet operating on Twitter — and being used to spread a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet was discovered during the…
Bots, your days of tweeting politically divisive nonsense might be numbered. The Washington Post reported Friday that in the last few months Twitter has aggressively suspended accounts in an effort…
Twitter has announced a range of actions intended to bolster efforts to fight spam and “malicious automation” (aka bad bots) on its platform — including increased security measures around account…
Increasingly we are going to be having bots conducting business on a company’s behalf. As that happens, it is going to require a trust mechanism to ensure that bot-to-bot communication…
European Union lawmakers want online platforms to come up with their own systems to identify bot accounts. This is as part of a voluntary Code of Practice the European Commission…
It’s official: Bots are doing a lot of PR grunt work on Twitter — especially when it comes to promoting porn websites. That perhaps unsurprising conclusion about what automated Twitter…
Suspicious likes lead to researcher lighting up a 22,000-strong botnet on Twitter
Botnets are fascinating to me. Who creates them? What are they for? And why doesn’t someone delete them? The answers are probably less interesting than I hope, but in the…
Customer service bot startup Agent IQ announces $6.3 million Series A led by Sierra Ventures
If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are…
Customer service bot startup Agent IQ announces $6.3 million Series A led by Sierra Ventures
If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are…
Stealth Security reels in $8 million investment from Shasta Ventures to root out bad bots
We live in world where bots are operating all over the internet. Like Glinda in the Wizard of Oz asking Dorothy if she is a good witch or a bad…
Twitter has provided updated details on its investigation into Russian election interference on its platform in 2016. Its identification of more than 13,000 more Russian-linked bots that made election-related tweets…
Just a few weeks ago I was in Utah for the holidays, spending time with the many family members my husband and I both have there. At one family gathering,…
For as much as its users love to hate on their platform of choice, Twitter occasionally really comes through with a deep dive on a hot topic that provides actual,…
Buying event tickets online isn’t a great experience. Sites like Ticketmaster are the default, but are difficult to use and expensive. A startup called Lea wants to offer a more…
Remember Ello? I recently wrote about this social networking site’s comeback. Since then, a handful of you have pinged me about its spam bot problem. Just yesterday, another person came…
At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company’s internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that platform is…
Research conducted by a group of data scientists looking at how information was diffused on Twitter around the June 2016 EU referendum vote suggests more than 150,000 Russian accounts were…
This week on Technotopia I talk to Chris Boos, the creator of a bot that can play FreeCiv, a Civilization clone. His solution demonstrates the power of machine learning and,…
It’s been just over a year since Salesforce introduced Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence technologies that are designed to underlie and enhance the Salesforce product set. Today, at Dreamforce, the…
If you’ve ever wondered if the hashtag heavy, politically far afield Twitter user you’re about to eviscerate in 140 characters is totally delusional or merely not quite sentient, well, wonder…
Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights…
Emilio Ferrara has been thinking about botnets for over a decade. As the first social networks climbed out of the mire, he noticed that they were very easy to game.…
According to Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute researcher, not all Twitter bots are born bad. He should know. Ferrara created a “large-scale experiment designed to analyze the spread…
Chatbots are vying to become one of the cornerstones of the messaging world: using AI tools like natural language and machine learning, developers are hoping to tap into the popularity…
Twitter bots – robots that interact with humans – have a long history. The Twitter API is fairly easy to use (I made a bot that plays Zork with a…
Wit.ai announced this morning in a blog post that it would be sunsetting its Bot Engine. The Facebook-owned company builds developer tools for natural language processing to help engineers build…
Chatbots – automated bots that let you interact with a service or brand via messaging apps or SMS – haven’t yet become breakout hits, as a group. But that hasn’t…
Want to chat with Alexa via Slack? A new bot called Silent Echo now makes that possible. The idea is that there are times when you want to interact with…
After raising $55 million last year to build its business beyond its existing help desk services, today Freshworks (the parent company of Freshdesk) has made an acquisition to help it…
