Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 3, 2018

Russian Bot Spotting, Magic Bullets, New York Times Tested

Filed under: Bots,Social Media,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 4:39 pm

How to Spot a Russian Bot by Daniel Costa-Roberts.

Spotting purported Russian bots on Twitter is a popular passtime for people unaware the “magic bullet” theory of communication has been proven to be false. One summary of “magic bullet” thinking:

…
The media (magic gun) fired the message directly into audience head without their own knowledge. The message cause the instant reaction from the audience mind without any hesitation is called “Magic Bullet Theory”. The media (needle) injects the message into audience mind and it cause changes in audience behavior and psyche towards the message. Audience are passive and they can’t resist the media message is called “Hypodermic Needle Theory”.
…

The “magic bullet” is an attractive theory for those selling advertising, but there is no scientific evidence to support it:

…
The magic bullet theory is based on assumption of human nature and it was not based on any empirical findings from research. Few media scholars do not accepting this model because it’s based on assumption rather than any scientific evidence. In 1938, Lazarsfeld and Herta Herzog testified the hypodermic needle theory in a radio broadcast “The War of the Worlds” (a famous comic program) by insert a news bulletin which made a widespread reaction and panic among the American Mass audience. Through this investigation he found the media messages may affect or may not affect audience.

“People’s Choice” a study conducted by Lazarsfeld in 1940 about Franklin D. Roosevelt election campaign and the effects of media messages. Through this study Lazarsfeld disproved the Magic Bullet theory and added audience are more influential in interpersonal than a media messages.
…

Nevertheless, MotherJones and Costa-Roberts outline five steps to spot a Russian bot:

  1. Hyperactivity – more than 50 or 60 tweets per day
  2. Suspicious images – stock avatar
  3. URL shorterners – use indicates a bot
  4. Multiple languages – polyglot indicates a bot
  5. Unlikely popularity – for given # of followers

OK, so let’s test those steps against a known non-Russian bot that favors the US government, the New York Times.

  1. Hyperactivity – New York Times joined Twitter, 2 March 2007, 4173 days, 328,555 tweets as of this afternoon, so, 78.73 on average per day. That’s hyperactive.
  2. Suspicious images – NYT symbol
  3. URL shorterners – Always – signals bot. (displays nytimes.com but if you check the links, URL shorterner)
  4. Multiple languages – Nope.
  5. Unlikely popularity – In which direction? NYT has 41,665,676 followers and only 17,145 likes, or one like for every 2340 followers.

On balance I would say the New York Times isn’t a Russian bot, but given it’s like to follower ratio, it needs to work on its social media posts.

Maybe the New York Times needs to hire a Russian bot farm?

June 23, 2018

Got Bots? Canadians to Monitor Online Chatter for Threats

Filed under: Bots,Cybersecurity,Government — Patrick Durusau @ 7:58 pm

NEB seeks contractor to monitor ‘vast amounts’ of online chatter for potential security threats.

From the post:

The federal regulator responsible for pipelines is seeking an outside company to monitor online chatter en masse and aggregate the data in an effort to detect security risks ahead of time.

The National Energy Board has issued a request for information (RFI) from companies qualified to provide “real-time capability to algorithmically process vast amounts of traditional media, open source and public social media data.”

It is asking applicants to provide a “short demo session” of their security threat monitoring services in early July.

“This RFI is part of our processes to ensure we are getting the services we require to proactively manage security threats, risks and incidents to help protect its personnel, critical assets, information and services,” NEB communications officer Karen Ryhorchuk said in an email.

“It is not specific to any project, application or issue.”
…

The National Energy Board website is loaded with details on human mistakes (read pipelines) in varying degrees of detail. First stop if you are looking to oppose, interfere with, or degrade a pipeline located in Canada.

It’s interesting to note that despite the RFI being reported, you won’t find it on the News Releases page for the National Energy Board. It’s not on their Twitter feed, NEBCanada as well.

Someone in Canada should know the Yogi Berra line:

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Well, perhaps not.

Still, if the Canadians are going to spend money on it, whoever they hire needs to earn their pay.

It’s would be trivial to create bots that randomly compose “alert” level posts, but the challenge would be to create an interlocking network of bots that “appear” to be interacting and responding to each others posts.

Thoughts on models of observed network communities that would be useful in training such a system?

There’s nothing guaranteed to stop governments from monitoring social media (if you believe government avowals of non-collection, well, that’s your bad), so the smart money is on generating too many credible signals for them to separate wheat from the chaff.

December 14, 2017

Twitter Bot Template – If You Can Avoid Twitter Censors

Filed under: Bots,Python,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 11:04 am

Twitter Bot Template

From the webpage:

Boilerplate for creating simple, non-interactive twitter bots that post periodically. My comparisons bot, @botaphor, is an example of how I use this template in practice.

This is intended for coders familiar with Python and bash.
…

If you can avoid Twitter censors (new rules, erratically enforced, a regular “feature”), then this Twitter bot template may interest you.

Make tweet filtering a commercial opportunity and Twitter can drop the cost with no profit center of tweet censorship.

Unlikely because policing other people is such a power turn-on.

Still, this is the season for wishes.

October 30, 2017

Bottery

Filed under: Bots,Social Media — Patrick Durusau @ 7:58 pm

Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by katecompton@

From the webpage:

Bottery is a syntax, editor, and simulator for prototyping generative contextual conversations modeled as finite state machines.

Bottery takes inspiration from the Tracery opensource project for generative text (also by katecompton@ in a non-google capacity) and the CheapBotsDoneQuick bot-hosting platform, as well as open FSM-based storytelling tools like Twine.

Like Tracery, Bottery is a syntax that specifies the script of a conversation (a map) with JSON. Like CheapBotsDoneQuick, the BotteryStudio can take that JSON and run a simulation of that conversation in a nice Javascript front-end, with helpful visualizations and editting ability.

The goal of Bottery is to help everyone, from designers to writers to coders, be able to write simple and engaging contextual conversational agents, and to test them out in a realistic interactive simulation, mimicking how they’d work on a “real” platform like API.AI.
…

Not a bot to take your place on social media but it does illustrate the potential of such a bot.

Drive your social “engagement” score with a bot!

Hmmm, gather up comments and your responses on say Facebook, then compare for similarity to a new comment, then select the closest response. With or without an opportunity to override the automatic response.

Enjoy!

October 29, 2016

I Spy A Mirai Botnet

Filed under: Bots,Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 8:12 pm

Rob Graham created telnetlogger to:

This is a simple program to log login attempts on Telnet (port 23).

It’s designed to track the Mirai botnet. Right now (Oct 23, 2016) infected Mirai machines from around the world are trying to connect to Telnet on every IP address about once per minute. This program logs both which IP addresses are doing the attempts, and which passwords they are using.

I wrote it primarily because installing telnetd on a Raspberry Pi wasn’t sufficient. For some reason, the Mirai botnet doesn’t like the output from Telnet, and won’t try to login. So I needed something that produced the type of Telnet is was expecting. While I was at it, I also wrote some code to parse things and extract the usernames/passwords.
…

Cool!

A handy, single purpose program that enables you to spy in Mirai botnets.

Rob has great notes on managing the output.

Perhaps you should publish the passwords you collect (internally) as fair warning to your users.

Or use them in an attempt to hack your own network, before someone else does.

Enjoy!

PS: It complies, etc., but even for the pleasure of spying on Mirai botnets, I’m not lowering my shields.

October 2, 2016

Security Community “Reasoning” About Botnets (and malware)

Filed under: Bots,Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 8:41 pm

In case you missed it: Source Code for IoT Botnet ‘Mirai’ Released by Brian Krebs offers this “reasoning” about a recent release of botnet software:

The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.

The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.
…

Being a recent victim of a DDoS attack, perhaps Kerbs anger about the release of Mirai is understandable. But only to a degree.

Non-victims of such DDoS attacks have been quick to take up the “sky is falling” refrain.

Consider Hacker releases code for huge IoT botnet, or, Hacker Releases Code That Powered Record-Breaking Botnet Attack, or, Brace yourselves—source code powering potent IoT DDoSes just went public: Release could allow smaller and more disciplined Mirai botnet to go mainstream, as samples.

Mirai is now available to “anyone” but where the reasoning of Kerbs and others breaks down is there is no evidence that “everyone” wants to run a botnet.

Even if the botnet was as easy (sic) to use as Outlook.

For example, gun ownership in the United States is now at 36% of the adult population, but roughly one-third of the population will not commit murder this coming week.

As of 2010, there were roughly 210 million licensed drivers in the United States. Yet, this coming week, it is highly unlikely that any of them will commandeer a truck and run down pedestrians with it.

The point is that the vast majority of users, even if they were competent to read and use the Mirai code, aren’t criminals. Nor does possession of the Mirai code make them criminals.

It could be they are just curious. Or interested in how it was coded. Or, by some off chance, they could even have good intentions and want to study it to fight botnets.

Attempting to prevent the spread of information hasn’t resulted in any apparent benefit, at least to the cyber community at large.

Perhaps its time to treat the cyber community as adults, some of who will make good decisions and some less so.

June 23, 2016

Bots, Won’t You Hide Me?

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Bots,Journalism,Machine Learning — Patrick Durusau @ 3:52 pm

Emerging Trends in Social Network Analysis of Terrorism and Counterterrorism, How Police Are Scanning All Of Twitter To Detect Terrorist Threats, Violent Extremism in the Digital Age: How to Detect and Meet the Threat, Online Surveillance: …ISIS and beyond [Social Media “chaff”] are just a small sampling of posts on the detection of “terrorists” on social media.

The last one is my post illustrating how “terrorist” at one time = “anti-Vietnam war,” “civil rights,” and “gay rights.” Due to the public nature of social media, avoiding government surveillance isn’t possible.

I stole the title, Bots, Won’t You Hide Me? from Ben Bova’s short story, Stars, Won’t You Hide Me?. It’s not very long and if you like science fiction, you will enjoy it.

Bova took verses in the short story from Sinner Man, a traditional African spiritual, which was recorded by a number of artists.

All of that is a very round about way to introduce you to a new Twitter account: ConvJournalism:

All you need to know about Conversational Journalism, (journalistic) bots and #convcomm by @martinhoffmann.

Surveillance of groups on social media isn’t going to succeed, The White House Asked Social Media Companies to Look for Terrorists. Here’s Why They’d #Fail by Jenna McLaughlin bots can play an important role in assisting in that failure.

Imagine not only having bots that realistically mimic the chatter of actual human users but who follow, unfollow, etc., and engage in apparent conspiracies, with other bots. Entirely without human direction or very little.

Follow ConvJournalism and promote bot research/development that helps all of us hide. (I’d rather have the bots say yes than Satan.)

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