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Researchers Buy Twitter Bots To Fight Twitter Spam
tsu doh nimh writes "The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers. Krebsonsecurity.com writes about a paper (PDF) being released today at the USENIX conference that details how researchers spent almost a year and $5,000 buying up accounts from 27 twitter account merchants, and then built templates to help Twitter detect accounts sold by these merchants — all with the aim of getting more of these bot accounts shut down before they can be used to spam legitimate Twitter users. The story goes into great detail on the lengths to which these account merchants will go to evade Twitter's anti-bot security measures."
Does hotmail have no security at all to detect bot created accounts? 60+% of all them. That's ridiculous.
Of course Twitter is a spam magnet. Twitter won't let people write Twitter clients with spam filters.
Now you're just making stuff up.
They gave $5000 to Twitter account merchants. It doesn't seem to me that was the smartest thing to do with the money if you actually want to discourage this kind of activity.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Those university guys are not that smart after all
Now...how can I get these guys to buy $5,000 worth of Anonymous Coward accounts....
Twitter should be blocking any post that is only a link sent to someone they've never interacted with before. That would remove 90% of the spam I receive there.
...without ever having visited twitter.com. It doesn't sound like I've missed much.
Ahh, the internet...
Twitter could shut down tomorrow and I could give zero fucks about the loss.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
to combat anyone who says we shouldn't invest in their warmongering with astroturfing ostensibly posted by "legitimate people"
why would the zionists bother? when you own entire media conglomerates twitter is small potatos. the secular zionist jews who run our media can make any story they want into "reality" and the twitter people will use those news releases as sources and talking points.
Nearly every spam I get these days uses the t.co link shortener to disguise the destination of the links. I report every one through Spamcop, which reports them to abuse@twitter.com, but it never seems to make a difference.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Why would anyone pay money to buy an account that lets you tell people what color your belly-button lint is today?
In order to get anyone to read a feed off twitter.com, you have to get them to subscribe to it -- if you go to twitter.com all you get is a sign-up form, you can't even browse or search to see what the site is about. You certainly can't find some randomly created account -- this scam seems pointless.
Of what possible use is one of these auto-generated accounts? The article does not explain.
Anyone?
Let's put aside for a moment that Twitter is one of the very stupidest things to come along in quite some time: a service for illiterate chimpanzees with attention-deficit disorder, as nobody of worth or value would bother reading or writing 140 characters at a time. Let's just pretend, for the sake of argument, that it's a useful service worth defending.
First, putting money into the pockets of its adversaries is idiotic.
Second, pretending that content/context filtering based on examination of their CURRENT methods will work TOMORROW is equally idiotic. (This is a recurring mistake among many wanna-be anti-spammers: they blithely presume that spammers will sit on their hands while countermeasures are developed and deployed, even though the multi-decade history of spammers demonstrates conclusively that they will not.)
Third, pretending that countermeasures which may be temporarily successful against a subset of spammers will enjoy long-term success against a significantly larger set of spammers is wishful thinking. (This is another recurring mistake among the wanna-be's: they don't realize that they've targeted the least-competent spammers. They're too busy patting themselves on the back to realize that all they've really accomplished is to clear the playing field for the professionals.)
Fourth, these researchers have failed -- completely -- to account for the presence of spammer allies inside Twitter. It is of course short-sighted, naive and very stupid to neglect this, since it's obvious on inspection that a nonzero number of Twitter staff are complicit in spamming activities. (And why not? The chances they'll be caught are tiny. The extra income is tax-free. And they can take multiple payoffs from multiple people for doing the same thing. Unless one wishes to make the patently absurd argument that 100.000% of Twitter employees are incorruptible, which of course is laughable and instantly disqualifies the speaker from serious conversation.)
The bottom line is that Twitter made a fundamental error before they even launched: they failed to perform an adversarial analysis, to ask themselves "how can our service be abused?" and then modify the design to deal with as many answers to that as possible. (This is hardly unique: many others have made the exact same mistake. Some are making it today.) Their failure to perform this analysis BEFORE finalizing design and deployment means that they're now left trying to backfill it. That has never worked. It's not working now. It's not going to work. So this little endeavor represents merely some feeble half-hearted attempt to deal with a tiny piece of an enormous problem...and event that attempt is doomed to fail as soon as spammers find it to be an inconvenience.
The best way to get rid of spammers, malware pushers and other scumbags is to reduce their profit potential and increase their risks. The best way to do that is prosecute and throw them in prison for long periods of time. This kind of activity is what laws like the "Computer fraud and abuse act" is supposed to be for. Of course you'll need honest governments and international co-operation so I'm not holding my breath.
With all their illegal monitoring you know the NSA and their foreign equivalents know exactly who these scumbags are and where they are. All we need to do is declare them cyber terrorists and loose the hounds on them!
beliebers are bots. That's the problem.
Sheep need to be feed.
Antes de compartir mis 5 mejores consejos del edificio del músculo con usted, quiero contarles un poco sobre mí. La razón por la que hago esto es para que sepa que usted está escuchando a alguien que realmente tiene experiencia en la construcción de músculo. Dicho esto, permítanme compartir con ustedes mi historia, y luego voy a compartir mi top 5 mejores consejos del edificio del músculo con usted. Cuando estaba en la escuela secundaria, yo era muy flaco. Yo fui uno de los niños scrawniest de mi clase. No importa lo que yo hice, no pude subir de peso. Mi amigo, Tony, que en realidad pasó a jugar la División 1 decamisetas de futbol, era una bestia. Simplemente no lo entiendo. Todo lo que hizo fue comer mantequilla de maní y mermelada, levantar pesas, y se las arregló para conseguir grandes. Por qué no se esta trabajando para mí? Al final resultó que, tenía un metabolismo mucho más rápido que mi amigo, Tony, y siguiendo exactamente lo que estaba haciendo, yo no estaba haciendo lo correcto para mi cuerpo. Con los años, he aprendido a seguir un programa que era correcto para mí, y desde entonces, me las he arreglado para construir más de 30 libras de masa muscular magra. Cómo lo hago? Este es el aspecto más importante de la construcción de músculo. Si usted no está comiendo lo suficiente, usted nunca va a crecer. La clave para la construcción de músculo es comer alimentos, y punto. Usted va a querer comer 500 calorías por encima de mantenimiento, y usted también va a querer estar seguro de que el 50% de sus calorías provienen de carbohidratos, 30% de proteínas y 20% de grasas. La mejor manera de construir músculo es hacer un plan de alimentación con base en torno a estos requisitos, comer la misma comida todos los días, y simplemente seguir consumiendo hasta que comience a aumentar de peso. 2. Siga el programa de entrenamiento adecuado. No todos los programas se reunió para construir músculo de manera óptima. Te recomiendo seguir un programa con una fracción de 3 días. Esto significa que usted va a entrenar el pecho y tríceps en un día, espalda y bíceps en otro día, y las piernas y los hombros de otro día. A continuación, repita la secuencia. En mi experiencia, esta división produce los resultados más eficaces para los flacos tratando de construir músculo. 3. Centrarse en el tiempo bajo tensión. Casi el 99,9% de los chicos que veo en el gimnasio deje su ego se interponga en el camino de la buena forma. Si usted realmente desea aumentar el tamaño, reducir la cantidad de peso en la barra, la práctica de la buena forma, y realmente se centran en la parte negativa de la elevación. La parte excéntrica del ascensor en realidad activa el crecimiento muscular. Al hacer esto, recuerde que cada juego debe tener entre 40 y 60 segundos en completarse. Si usted está recibiendo un conjunto hecho en un corto período de tiempo, usted no está entrenando sus músculos de manera óptima para el tamaño. Sé que todo el mundo le dice que usted necesita para levantar pesados con el fin de crecer. Esto no es cierto. Es necesario concentrarse en un peso que le permitirá golpear el rango de 8 a 12 repeticiones, como de 8 a 12 repeticiones es óptimo para la construcción de tamaño muscular. Si no me crees, ver algunos videos de buena reputación en línea, y usted verá que la mayoría de los gurús de fitness le dirá lo mismo. Encontrar a alguien que escuche, y enfermos con ellos. El problema para muchos chicos tienen es que mantienen obtener asesoramiento de diferentes personas, y nunca elegir algo y aferrarse a él. Si usted realmente desea conseguir resultados, es necesario escoger una persona, siga sus consejos, y aferrarse a él. Es prob