Slashdot Mirror
Dozens of Tech Bigwigs Friend Facebook Spambot
jfruhlinger writes "If you've used Facebook or Twitter, you're almost certainly familiar with 'bimbots' — accounts that have profile pics of attractive women, but seem to exist only to send send spam links with varying degrees of subtlety. Henry Copeland, the founder of BlogAds, tracks the social network of one such Facebook bot, and finds that she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks. Copeland also tracks down the origin of the photo that accompanies the account."
But it's a hot bot just take a look at her profile picks. I mean if we don't support these first versions of sex robots then how are people going to get funding for the actual nondigital versions.
Who wasn't a friend of SmarterChild?
Executives are not very computer savvy. And this is a surprise because....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Most influential Tech folks were nerds growing up, so why wouldn't they say yes if some hot girl friended them on Facebook.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
I just thought that the river rocks in the picture would be ideal for an upcoming landscaping project I have in mind.
I know every single one of my friends... but most of my account privacy settings allow "friends of friends" to see my stuff and comment on it.
I'm just plain careful what I post on Facebook that's all... most of my stuff is throwaway weird random stuff
Go ahead.... friend me "Thomas Dzubin"
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks
If these people are influential or media folks as it says, then they probably have tons of requests all the time. They are "important" people that love to be heard. The more followers/friends/whatever they have the better. They aren't going to spend a lot of time sifting through the requests to see who's real or not.
The story link is to "blogads.com". So this story is probably a spam.
I'm pretty sure most of these bigwigs are not actually managing their own social network profile, and that the Public Relations drone or Image Consultant who runs it for them is under instructions to accept all friend requests.
They are more like fan pages than personal accounts.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
/.'ed already. Anyone know who the "influential" execs are? Even better, got a picture of this babe? :-)
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Clearly these folks were associating themselves with this "bimbot" in the name of research.
How in the world could they hope to address this problem without first fully understanding it?
Here is the article from Google's cache:
Are you also exposing your private parts to strangers on Facebook?
by henrycopeland
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Think it’s only old men in trench coats and — ahem — congressmen who like to share intimate moments with attractive strangers?
Based on my own Facebook experience, I’ve seen at least 100 influential tech, media and politics folks — men and some women — accept friend requests from attractive women they don’t know. For as long as three years, these supposedly savvy folks have been having personal conversations and sharing photos online in front of strangers that few (if any) of them know personally. And they are, inadvertently, sharing lots of their friends’ private data with these strangers.
These people are in the tech, media and political digital elite. They should know better, right? They include professors at Harvard, Columbia, NYU, CEOs and execs at Internet companies, e-consulting firms, ad networks, and PR companies. They include senior journalists and editors at places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. Details below.
It’s possible that one or more of the winsome Facebook profiles who these e-savants have friended are robots — bimbots? — who exist only to spy on their influential friends’ private lives.
Who is the tech and media elite eagerly friending? Let’s start with the Facebook profile of one Nicole Bally.
Does anyone out there actually know Nicole Bally? Please write me ASAP if you do. Though Facebook says she’s got 697 friends, I suspect she doesn’t exist or, at least, isn’t operating on Facebook under her real name or photo. I left a message on Nicole Bally’s wall yesterday asking where she works, but haven’t heard anything back. Hello Nicole Bally, are you out there?
Nicole Bally’s list of Facebook friends includes people like Sean Parker, Arianna Huffington, Dana Milbank, Joichi Ito, Chad Hurley, Chris Anderson, Henry Blodget, James Fallows, Jeffrey Toobin, Camille Paglia, Curtis Sliwa, Jimmy Wales, John Dickerson, Loic Le Meur, Seth Godin, Amanda Congdon, Jim Kramer, Howard Kurtz, Steve Case, Pete Cashmore, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Tim Draper, Nouriel Roubini, Jim Breyer, Sarah Lacy, Vint Cerf, Wes Clark the list goes on and on. Here’s the full list.
You’ve almost got to worry if you’re NOT on the list of Nicole Bally’s friends.
Nicole Bally sent me a friend request a while back and I almost fell for it. Hey, 40 people who I know and trust are her friends. Apparently.
When I finally friended Nicole Bally back yesterday (to further this investigation!) I discovered that roughly 99% of the posts on her Facebook wall are simply people accepting her friend requests. Some guys muster up an eager “hey, let’s have lunch sometime!”
Do the tech and media elite actually look at Nicole Bally’s wall posts before accepting her friend request? Among her very few personal posts over the course of three years are several about mywebpost.com.
Mywebpost.com?
Nicole Bally’s photo albums feature just three generic images posted in March of 2008 shortly after she joined Facebook, one of Mark Zuckerberg and two stock-photo-like images from March 2008, one subtitled “A wonderful time with a wonderful friend” and the other “The most beautiful place in the world.”
I’ve done more hunting online, but can’t find anything solid about Nicole Bally. Surely if she works in media or advertising in NYC or San Francisco and knows so many famous-for-pixels people, she would show up on LinkedIn or someone’s Flickr photo album.
Do any of you know Nicole Bally? If not, why have so many of you friended her and why are you sharing your private lives with her?
When a colleague of mine looked around online for other instances of Nicole Bally’s prof
"long list of influential tech and media folks."
By which, you mean people who use facebook for publicity and will likely friend anyone.
When I see stuff like this I get instantly suspicious and for good reason. Most services that cater to single men wanting companionship are so flooded with fake profiles of hot girls, spam links, etc. that I begin to associate a hot girl with someone who just wants something from me, be it attention, money, or just to screw with me. Want this kind of thing to stop? Then don't take the bait. Don't give these attention whores and/or spammers what they want. Just pretend they don't exist and they'll go away and there will only be real women left. This probably won't happen because men in our society put women on such a high pedestal that it increases their 'theoretical stock value' above what is realistic, much like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. With so many men going after so few attractive women, we undervalue our 'stock' so we often do not end up with the kind of women that reflect our intrinsic value. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how our attitudes towards women affects our society at least at the socioeconomic level. Increasing divorce rates are one symptom. In conclusion, we collectively are responsible for the appearance of these bimbots, fake profiles, and why most Slashdotters will never find a girlfriend. Like advertisements, if we ignore them, they'll disappear.
Link in article is to: blog.web.blogads.com
It's all well and good that your high-profile execs just want that 'social publicity' and let their admins run it for them. Until their admins accept these spam-bot contacts and then wind up getting socially engineered into released important/sensitive/confidential information, like passwords.
Then what happens is you have Sony, you have Citi, and you have numerous other smaller gaffes that I don' t really need to enumerate here.
You want publicity, fine... but make it a one way road. Don't even give them the chance of spamming you. Some spam is LETHAL in the wrong hands.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
harvest their weiner pics and blackmail them.
Photo apparently stolen from here:
http://journal.crossfit.com/2005/10/getting-off-the-crack-by-nicol.tpl
I'm not so sure, actually. Some of the absolute worst PHB's I've ever had the misfortune to work with, weren't MBA types, but former brilliant coders. They're the guys who thought they're still expert enough to take tech decisions by themselves, just because they once coded some clever calculations in FORTRAN and subscribe to some IT-for-managers ragazine. The fact that a lot still had the typical nerd personality of just having to be right about everything, and taking even the theoretical possibility of their ever being wrong as directly and insultingly questioning their intelligence, and you can see where this is going.
The MBA types, well [i]some[/i] of the MBA types, at least knew they know bugger-all and delegated to someone who does know.
I suspect that a good part of the reason is: Dunning-Kruger effect. The ones who know the least, tend to overestimate how much they actually know. But there seems to be a dangerous middle, where someone has slipped back just enough to think again that they know everything there is to known, but also slipped back enough that the parts they don't know start actually meaning they take dumb decisions.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You like this http://tinyurl.com/4yn3fuq
Uh, right.
I get friend requests; if I don't know who they are, they get rejected. Why would I accept a FR from a complete stranger? If 40 of my friends know the person, I'd probably know them, or of them too.
Some people just need to take their brain out of Neutral; Drive preferably, but even Reverse would be better than nothing.
You know, a lot of celebrities accept all friend requests. It sort of doesn't matter, because they know not to put important info on their page. And isn't 697 a low number of friends for a spambot? You can have 5,000 friends.
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That Famous People (or more likely their media relations people) are as susceptible to social engineering as the rest of us is news... how?
Camille Paglia author of Backlash , and Howard Rheingold author of The Virtual Community are both on the first bimbot's list.
It boggles the mind.
It's on a site with a "poor reputation".
Slow news day. I don't think 'friends' in Facebook terms means what the author supposes (or hopes). Personally I think Facebook should never have used and abused the word 'friend'. But 'acquaintance' is a bit unwieldy and still not accurate. 'Connection'? Anyway, 'friend' just doesn't work IMHO.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Yeah, but also for a lot of people the number of "friends" they have on some list, is some kind of self-validation and status symbol.
To understand what I'm about to say, I must mention Dunbar's Number, which mans basically for a given species, how many relationships you can juggle around in your head. For Homo Sapiens that's a little under 150. The most primitive tribes can work without any form of organization below that number, for example, by simple virtue of everyone being friends with everyone else in the tribe. When it grows above that number, the tribe eventually splits into two.
But basically that's it: 150. If you try to be pals with an 151'th person, someone else falls off the other end of that list. It's like a total amount of fuck you can give. You start giving a fuck about an 151'th person, you stop having a fuck to give about someone else ;)
And that includes RL pals, co-workers, relatives, ex-classmates one stays in contact with, guild-mates in WoW that one interacts enough with, etc.
The limit, btw, seems to be a function of brain size and complexity, and really a built in constant for each species. I know lots of nerds like to imagine they're some sort of mutant for which basic biology doesn't apply, and who know better than doctors what their metabolism needs or how their brain works or how many hours of sleep they really need, but they're usually proven wrong sooner or later, and usually in a nasty way. Just like those who think they can live on twinkies and energy drinks then discover they weren't mutants after all, same applies here: one may think he's the super-guy who can juggle 2000 relationships, but chances are that they're just as capped at 150 as everyone else.
But fine, let's say someone is really a complete mutant and can juggle... how much 200? 300? It's still far below the numbers of "friends" some people think they have just for having a name on a list.
What I'm getting at is that whether someone is "just another tubby, pockmarked, unkempt, pizza-sauce-stained, geeky dude like themselves" is fully irrelevant for the guy/gal with 21,537 friends on his list. He just doesn't even have the biological wiring to give a fuck either way about that many people. At that point, whether someone is actually a hot porn actress or a tubby basement-dweller is not even relevant any more. All that really matters is just that aggregate "21,537 friends" number to use as an e-peen meter.
And they'd probably accept the request for the 21,538'th friend even if it came with a text of "hi, I'm a spam bot written by a 50 year old virgin still living with his retired mom, do you want to be my friend?" Because, fuck, that's now 21,538 friends. Eat that, you losers with only 21,537 friends on your lists.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A quick search on the picture with Tineye.com returns the name Nicole Carroll, who posts about nutrition and dieting on crossfit.com:
http://journal.crossfit.com/2005/10/getting-off-the-crack-by-nicol.tpl
The original thumbnail is here:
http://journal.crossfit.com/images/thumbnails/nicole.baeef534.png
Why would someone do that?
Yeah, and did you see those sharp knees on her!?! Just hideous. You could lose an eye (or two) to those things.
Upon visiting this page do you guys get loads of dating ads?
A profile pic of a moderately attractive woman? That's it?
Now for me to be lured in, there would have to be regular posts, with pics, about things like:
"Washed my car in a bikini top and Daisy Duke shorts today. Got all wet. Tee hee! ;-)"
"Took some pics on my sportbike while I was outside."
"Had this fruit freezy at lunch today. Tastes so good. See how much I enjoy it? Mmmmmm...."
"How do these new shoes look? Ignore the very short skirt, just look at the shoes."
"Decided to drop rose petals on my bed and pose in my underwear. Was bored."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The guy asks for more information on the person pictured, yet he doesn't provide any way for contacting him. What... and idiot.
For those curious, the woman's abs aren't showing, and they're hot. Google for Nicole Carroll and you'll see the person who's picture was stolen.
... if I get a "friend" request ( or whatever the site names it), and it's an attractive female, i think a few things:
1. It's fake
2. It's some chick with some horrible mental problems to want to be friends with me.
Yep, only 2 things. So i just ignore it.
Seriously, why would i want to be friends with someone I don't know?
I don't like being friends with half the people I already know.
Be seeing you...