Nanny robot from Artificial Intelligence movie
Are You Following A Bot? →
“One day last February, a Twitter user in California named Billy received a tweet from @JamesMTitus, identified in his profile as a “24 year old dude” from Christchurch, New Zealand, who had the avatar of a tabby cat. “If you could bring one character to life from your favorite book, who would it be?,” @JamesMTitus asked. Billy tweeted back, “Jesus,” to which @JamesMTitus replied: “honestly? no fracking way. ahahahhaa.” Their exchange continued, and Billy began following @JamesMTitus. It probably never occurred to him that the Kiwi dude with an apparent love of cats was, in fact, a robot.”
Source The Atlantic
For now, similar (social engineering) operations are performed by trained professionals.
(Source: awaitinginput)
CRAIN'S NY: U.S. Attorney and FBI shut down popular Internet poker sites. →
“The companies arranged for the money taken in from U.S.-based gamblers to be disguised as payments to hundreds of non-existent online merchants claiming to sell items like jewelry and golf balls…”
The article describes how “dummy corporations and websites” were part of the scheme. It also cites an executive of Wynn Resorts who calls for regulation of Internet gaming.
Unfortunately, the heavily politicized issues of Internet gaming, pornography and malware could eventually spill over to affect the rights of legitimate website operators.
(Source: inothernews)
Piano that plays itself
"Twitter Cracks Down on Third-Party Clients" →
“The issue, says Sarver, is consistency. Twitter users need to be able to experience the service in a uniform manner.”
One developer’s take on Twitter’s new roadmap:
“…I am so happy I cut the cord with Twitter long before they got to this point. I’m pretty far along in doing a new user interface for microblogging, one without many of Twitter’s limits.”
Twitter, like Facebook, has had legal issues with its privacy policy. Twitter’s crack down was preceded by a settlement with the FTC:
“Under the terms of the settlement, Twitter will be barred for 20 years from misleading users about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information…”
Twitter cracked down on third-party clients in response to what is essentially an internal issue. More importantly, this chain of events was sparked by a government agency—for better and worse.
