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Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Message Men
An anonymous reader writes: Gizmodo's Annalee Newitz looked through the source code contained in the recent Ashley Madison data dump and found evidence that the company created tens of thousands of bot accounts designed to spur their male users into action by sending them messages. "The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager." The evidence suggests bots sent over 20 million messages on the website, and chatted with people over 11 million times. The vast majority of fake accounts — 70,529 to 43 — pretended to be female, and the users targeted were almost entirely men. Comments left in the code indicate some of the issues Ashley Madison's engineers had to solve: "randomizing start time so engagers don't all pop up at the same time" and "for every single state that has guest males, we want to have a chat engager." The AI was unsophisticated, though one type of bot would try to convince men to pay and then pass them to a real person.
How is this legal? Tricking people into paying for accounts by convincing them that someone is trying to message them would be fraud, wouldn't it?
I HAVE BEEN FOOLED
What online game community doesn't have NPC's?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Men looking to get laid got lied to and exploited.
News at 11.
'Fraud' in one form or another (in the legal sense or otherwise) is rampant in all online dating. The fact of the matter is, any sort of 'dating' service is always going have an overabundance of male clients.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if, in the final analysis, they discover that the so-called 'data breach' was perpetrated by the owners of Ashley Madison themselves, and that it was always their plan to blackmail their clientele.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Everyone thinks how Eeevil that the company managers were, but it was evil programmers who implemented this stuff.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
It would be amusing if the first bot to pass a turing test is from a dating website rather than a university.
How exactly is this surprising? That happens on so many websites that work on a subscription basis. Especially those where you can't read the incoming messages unless you have a subscription. I'm not surprised at all.
> 10s of thousands of robot women trying to simultaneously satisfy over 2,000,000 men
Those are some slutty bots! yeowwww don't yell at me tumblr!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Porn/cam/sexchat sites regularly do this too, and probably pretty much 100% of the rest of the adult on-line hook-up/dating sites as well. Sorry guys, melonsacidhoney69 isn't real. Neither is Pro Wrestling. Sorry.
KFI morning host Bill Handel created an Ashley Madison account:
handle: smallpenis640
weight: 220
height: 4'4"
picture: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
He had 3 interested 'women' messaging him in under an hour. And of course you have to pay to message back. This is where most of their money comes from.
Not sure what happened after that, but yeah, AM, all those 'real women' that 'really' use your site.
As OK Cupid pointed out, you should never pay for ANY online dating., The economic model is against you. http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating.html
Soon after publishing that famous essay the site was bought by a paid for dating site: it remains free, but had to take that essay down (this is a cached version)
I met my wife on OK Cupid, and her anecdotal experience confirms that paid for sites are the pits. On paid for sites she was always being hassled by obnoxious men, but free sites (POF, OKC) are much quicker to delete bad accounts. Dating sites get most of their money from desperate men paying large amounts every month. It's easy to keep them coming via fake female accounts. Even large "reputable" companies do it, and have been caught out on TV shows. Heck you can check it yourself: sign up for a paid for dating site, put the photos into Google image search, and see how long it takes before you get a fake. But sexual desperation is such that men will still go there,
...is if the hackers behind this were a group of women.
I have all the qualities such women love:
I'm slightly out of shape, I've slightly overweight, I'm bald, middle-aged, married and desperate to get laid but cannot afford a prostitute.
Are you seriously saying that the 22 year old professional playboy model, Courtney from L.A. isn't real??
...but she sent me pictures!
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
"For entertainment purposes only" - it gets you off the hook for ohhhhhh so much.
It's not legal, its conspiracy to commit fraud.
Its not much dissimilar to Uber's fake taxis (Uber shows lots of taxis moving around on the map, but these taxis are not real, they're fake to lure you into booking taxis with them).
I'm starting to think they "hacked" their own server for the publicity.
In the 90's I built a kind of porn version of Eliza, but I never went through with the plans to put it live, perhaps out of shame.
I wasn't going to claim they were real women, just put it on the web and sell ad space or clicks. Customers can't sue me if they didn't pay anything
The women were implied to be "foreign" via hazy decorative images, to explain their limited grasp of English. I planned to study the dialogs with customers and improve it over time, or at least mix things up to seem more organic.
I had "rule" tables with probabilities, not unlike a Markov chain, and a kind of crude conceptual model of the human body to prevent unrealistic combinations. "Silly boy, my [x] cannot reach my [y]. I'm not that rubber dummy you like so much. I taste better." I also had a phrase tracker to prevent excessive duplication. (Maybe I should've sold it to the Slashdot Dupe Story Inspection Department :-)
Table-ized A.I.
Or A Brain Scrub...
"Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Massage Men"
This of course would be of great interest to the Slashdot Community. Maybe the Bots could be 3D Printed to have the appearance of whomever one wished. If one is going to commit a Marital Infidelity with a Machine, why settle for Ordinary.
Alas, I read it wrong...
I'm impressed, Thousands of men had affairs with AI's. Simply beautiful service. Too bad they were exposed so soon, instead of their engineers having ever more funds to improve the AI's.
Female dirty chat bots ? Is this a IBM Watson application
Kinda reminds me of the insurance fraud, when the crooks setup an insurance company and the sold the policies to a reinsurance company.
Used a computer to figure how many claims they could file without being out bound on the actuarial tables.
Looks like this one is legal because of the weasel words in the TOS.
But who would sign up for services like this in the future ?
Bender ?
Shake that shiny metal ass !
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
Is my ex-girlfriend was an actual real, legitimate user of the website. I sure know how to pick 'em.
Site based on dubious ethics shows dubious ethics in dealings with clients. Why was this a surprise?
You you check 99% of all 'dating' sites you'll see code that has bots 'talking' to real accounts.. It's nothing new or suprising, and if it is to you, you are really naive..
I don't believe there's is a right or a wrong.
We've been conditioned that it's "right" to stay faithful to one spouse. I don't like it personally when one "cheats" but for some persons it works. It's called an open marriage. Social conditioning is what I think made this harder to talk about. Why is it so hard to be honest and say: "You I love and I want to be with you, but I want to experience other things." Again it doesn't work for me (maybe I'm a prude in this regard), but I've known some people who it did work for.
And because they were in an open marriage but there were limits (strangely enough, for me).
This was for me an eye opener. They didn't lie. They didn't try to hurt each other. They talked to each other more honestly than I ever talked to any of my other girlfriends. Ashley Madison is just a product of a defunct society.
I misread the title as "Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Massage Men" at first and wondered what everyone was complaining about.
This is so appalling. I am deeply shocked - all these poor men that were lied to.
I am still hesitating tho whether it is good that they were communicating with bots instead of some indian guy sitting in a sweatshop.
Oh... so they were sneaky... that justifies making their user database publicly available and the resulting suicides and extortions, right? Whatever helps you sleep at night.
The key phrase is "communications from such persons may not be true, accurate or authentic and may be exaggerated or fantasy".
A bot isn't a person.
A fake account isn't a person.
IANAL, but those TOS terms aren't going to save them. AM is screwed.
The bottom part of the article is actually quite positive about Ashley Madison. Quote: "Itâ(TM)s possible, as one person put it to me in email, that Ashley Madison was actually a pretty decent hookup site for gay peopleâ"but that was mostly because the system was designed to ignore them."
It's the straight dudes that get inundated by spam messages. So if you're he-man don't bother signing up for an Ashley Madison account.
So, about three years ago I was miserable in my marriage. All my close friends advised me to leave my wife, but none of them could offer me a place to crash until I could get on my own feet. I was in an acute emotional crisis that needed an immediate remedy, and my only choice was to find a way to suck it up and work through the pain and deal with it. No woman has to go through this. If a woman is having an acute emotional crisis due to a bad marriage, the world opens its doors to her. Their friends will take them in, they have shelters, they have all kinds of free community resources. Men have precisely dick for options. If your parents are dead, you're fucked, and oh well. No one cares. Deal with it.
So while I was sucking it up and trying to pull together enough money to establish a new household from scratch, I decided to try making my interim time less miserable by having an affair. Millions of men do it every year. Why hell, there are even ads everywhere encouraging it! "Life is short! Have an affair!" That was how I came to know Ashley Madison.
I created a profile there, and it wasn't long before I got a message from a girl. She lived really far away, and nothing in her profile indicated she was in any way looking for me. I tried to open it anyway, and in order to do so, I had to go purchase credits. I intended to make the smallest possible purchase, which was something like $60, but somewhere between clicking on the "economy package" and clicking on the "I approve" button, they got me turned around, and when the invoice appeared, I had just spent something on the order of $370! I never have figured out how they pulled that off, but I'm sure if I could go back and look at the fine print, they had their asses covered.
The "girl" messaged me again, and that was when I figured out I had spent $370 to talk to a fucking bot. All the "girls" on there were bots, except the one human who did contact me. By that point, I had given up on meeting anyone through the site, but I still had like 900 credits left, so I kept the account open with a blank profile. The real chick who messaged me sent a bunch of free amateur porn to a blank profile with no personal info and no picture. She was looking for ANYBODY in the area desperate enough to have sex with her, and it was immediately obvious why she was so desperate. I have a buddy whose standard in a sex partner is that it has to be a living mammal, so I hooked them up. She got laid, and I, having learned my lesson, deleted my account and dumped the remaining credits in the trash. They were worthless anyway.
Turing test triumphs. Twaddle trumps testosterone.
match.com and other dating sites do the same thing. There is no way some 23 year old hottie is looking to talk to me.
Am I the only one who read the headline as "Ashley Madison Source Code Shows Evidence They Created Bots To Massage Men"?
My first thought was, "I'm buying Ashley Madison stock today".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hi I'm chris Harrison and ..................... chat ended.
Why is this obsession with AM? Have you looked at the medical reps from pharmaceuticals? All reps assigned to female doctors are young good looking men, and all reps assigned to male doctors are good looking young women. If any extra marital flings happen because of this, it is not likely to be any more than general population in the average. All businesses gauge how far their target (doctors in this case) is likely to go, and find people (reps in this case) willing to let them go exactly that far. The targets of AM were willing to really far. AM could have hired the women who work on phone sex lines to post and milk their chumps. It is possible they did that too. And all this software is to weed out the really serious targets from spammers and scammers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It may be difficult to sue for the fake girls, but the fact that it was offered that you could pay money to have your account info deleted from the server but it was not removed at all could be a rather viable way for a lawsuit.
I put a somewhat fake account on there but made the home town real. I never had any intention of actually meeting someone or even messaging someone since to do so would cost money. But I was curious about the workings of the site and my suspicion going in was that most of the women's accounts were fakes that were made to encourage men to pay. My own profile was pretty accurate except for the picture and name, and, frankly, while I'm not a bad-looking guy for my age I'm also not the kind of guy who'll be reeling them in left and right given my otherwise average-looking "stats" and such. I don't remember what picture I used but it was definitely not someone that women would flock to.
I began to immediately get a daily email with two or three women who were new to the site. They were all 20-something babes who mainly lived in the smaller towns within 60 miles of the major metro area in which I live. From what I could tell, the code was made to push the younger fake profiles but would throw in outliers who were closer to my age. It sounds like they're not as sophisticated as I would be but my guess is that the fake profiles were made to tend toward the 20s in age with some distribution that would push out fewer profiles as the age went up.
Within two or three days these profiles would be gone. Going back through the daily emails the pictures would bring up broken links. But there was always a fresh batch each day.
One of the issues I saw with their code was that they didn't seem to properly weigh the population of a city when making the fake profiles. So, a town that has 1/20th - some even 1/50th - the population of my city was pumping out the same number of profiles. Like there are more horny women in small towns.
The fake profiles were also lacking in specs. I mean, they were sparsely filled out.
I spent probably 30 minutes one day just surfing profiles and I was unable to see any female accounts that looked real. From what I've read about the data dump it's likely that none were real. Actually, it's likely that few men on the site ever found a real female profile.
It was obvious they were scammers.
The terms and conditions for brazilian users tell exactly this, more specific the section 5 that in english is 195 words long, but in portuguese is 764 words long. And thats not just because of the translation, this part goes into more details on what they do.
It says:
"In order to allow guests in our site to experience the kind of communication they expect as members, we may create profiles that may interact with them.
The purpose of us creating these profiles is to provide entertainment for our guests, to allow guests users to explore our services and to promote greater participation in our services. The messages sent are computer generated. The messages from the profiles we create try to simulate communications so you can also become a member, pushing you into participating in more conversations and to raise interaction between friends.
You acknowledge and agree that some profiles published in the site, with whom you may communicate as a guest, may be fictitious. The purpose of the creation of these profiles is to provide our invited users with entertainment."
So, at least to non paying users its clear that a lot of the females users and their messages are computer generated.
More here in Portuguese: http://gizmodo.uol.com.br/term...
Should have use Craigs List.
I want all of my messages to have a happy ending.
Have gnu, will travel.
Of the 70K+ AM Fembots created, Python was not used. In my AI classes, the teachers used Python for examples. Could the use of PHP over Python be an example of using an older object oriented type language over a newer OO language is more useful for enterprise level endeavors?
And where could one get a copy of AM's software?
Bots say cheat. CHEAT! CHEAT! Cheat say the bots. CHEAT! You bots
"The internet is a cesspool of dubious information", or so I heard around 1993 on a Mindvox forum. I think Reive wrote that.
Nowadays, election campaigns are being driven by AI bots programmed to spread false rumors. It's a little more serious than people paying to "date" virtual software robots, believing they are going to score anonymous affairs.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
So... that's like, what, eight or nine women?
Or are you counting law enforcement trolls, male impostors, and corporate shills, too? That'd probably get you up to 40% or so of these site's supposedly "female" accounts, the rest being bots pretending to be women, which don't count as "working, self-sufficient adults."
I'm truly glad you met someone you found worthwhile, but in the vast majority of situations, these sites are not good hunting grounds for an actual reasonable partner.
The old standbys are still by far the best, assuming one can pull their head out of their phone or laptop or ipad long enough to actually look around them and actually speak to people. Laundromats, grocery stores, libraries, classes of various types, museums, music stores (what few are left.) You know, places where reasonable, normal people tend to go and can be engaged in the creaky old technique of face-to-face, physically-present conversation. Where you can smell each other, sense each others body language, see how the other person moves, how they do at/with eye contact, make physical contact, engage in courting and other courteous behaviors...
I truly think the current crop of young people have gone and shot themselves in the foot with their overwhelmingly present "everything is online all the time" mentality. Not that you can't find someone online, of course you can, but the real world is still a much better place to try. If, of course, you have at least basic social skills and at least a few desirable characteristics. If not, then things haven't changed one whit -- you're screwed, and not in the "OMG I scored" way. Online won't help such a situation either.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Back when I was single I signed up for JDate (a dating service aimed at Jewish singles). Now, I live in a part of Silicon Valley area that is not a hotbed of Jews (like say parts of New York City). There's a high percentage of Hispanics that live in the area/zipcode.
But somehow, there seemed to be dozens of 25-35yr old, single, Jewish women within a 5 mile radius of where I lived.
What was even more odd was that if you looked at their photos, they were disproportionately Asian. I know there are "Asian Jews" out there, but really. I have no doubt that JDate fills out bogus profiles of attractive, but fake, women and labels them Jewish.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you....
mark
Now just give the robots a physical form and you can remove those pesky human females from the equation all together.
Ashley Madison was run by a JEW... who created fake people...
Just like 9/11 was pulled off by JEWS, who created 3,000 fake 'victims', (known as 'Vicsims').
Read the CNN 9/11 Memorial tributes of a hundred random 'victims', and see for yourself. Half of the victims don't even have a photo - how is that possible? No family members thought it would be worthwhile sending a picture of their loved one to CNN, for the most famous memorial to victims of terrorism? Read the tributes - you'll see that a large proportion are from people who didn't even claim to KNOW the deceased, and you'll also see that comparatively few are from immediate family members. Why? How is that even possible? You'll also start to realise that these 'tributes' were written by a small group of people... not the 3,000+ different people that the CNN 9/11 Memorial alleges...
Bastards..
Why do you say are you a real hot married woman not a bot?
Earlier you said something about your mother.
I used Ashely Madison and I appear in the database download, so it's for real and I don't doubt it.
My problems with the site essential came down to the obvious fact that it was bullshit; You paid to have these 'credits', and then there was an incessant influx of 'women' who wanted to 'communicate', forcing you to use your credits for 'communication' that never went anywhere, depleting your credits and eventually requiring you to buy more in order to continue the charade.
AND THEN, to top it off, in order to quit the site, they wanted you to PAY. How bullshit is that? AND NOW, we discover, that even those who paid, were not actually deleted.
As much as I think the people who released this information are themselves morally bankrupt (Hey fuck you I can cheat if I want to!), Ashley Madison deserves to die die die! for their game playing bullshit. Fuck you ashley madison, you deserve what you got!
The Denver Post wrote that the cite's clients included government officials. Even those in the Homeland Security Department. Was the Post accurate or following a rumor?