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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?
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!
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.
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...
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
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..
As a freelance programmer I'm supposed to turn down a paying gig because it exploits adulterers? I'm going with gray area area on that one, which means I will certainly cash that check. Ask me to help with your spambot though and I will say no thank you, sir.
it doesn't work for me
It doesn't work for men! We are waaaay more disadvantaged in the game of finding casual partners. Blame it on the economic law of supply and demand, perhaps.
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.
it doesn't work for me
It doesn't work for men! We are waaaay more disadvantaged in the game of finding casual partners. Blame it on the economic law of supply and demand, perhaps.
It's actually very easy: you need to possess and display power and influence. With sufficient power and influence you don't even need to hide - you can openly have as many women as you want. Regardless of power and influence women still have to hide their extramarital dalliances unless they want to lose the marriage. Powerful and influential men don't.
So, stop complaining and get to work on becoming a millionaire :-)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
So, stop complaining and get to work on becoming a millionaire :-)
Unfortunately the continuous strain of finding a woman has always distracted me from the work needed to become a millionaire :-)
They should sell the technology to the makers of RealDoll, the hyper-realistic sex doll. They could charge a ton for an anamatronic version that could talk dirty.
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.
Toxic ideas about masculinity are the root problem. Women had the same issues in the 50s, before women's lib. If they were not married with kids they were worthless. There was a lot of pressure to find a man and keep him.
Once men realize that they are not defined by how much sex they are having or how hot their girlfriend is they will not only be a lot happier, but also have more success with the ladies. Seriously, if you want regular, good sex the best way to get it is to find a good long term partner. Not necessarily a lover, it can still be just causal sex, but going out one night looking for a one time thing is a really inefficient method and rarely results in really good sex because that takes time for two people to figure out.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Where is the ratio of males to females 1:3? Have you already passed into heaven?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
There is no way some 23 year old hottie is looking to talk to me.
It's perfectly normal for a 23 year old hottie to be talking to me. Unfortunately, it's my daughter asking when food will be ready.
That's really disturbing, calling your daughter a hottie.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Ask me to help with your spambot though and I will say no thank you, sir.
But it exploits the stupid, and don't stupid people deserve to be exploited just as much as adulterers?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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...
This is exactly true. Match.com seemed to be legit 10+ years ago, but these days it's a total scam. I signed up for an account there recently (since I'm back in the market and all....), since I wasn't getting far on OKCupid, thinking I'd try a different site to see if there was a different crowd of women there. It completely reeked of being a scam; I never did give them any money, thankfully, but the signs were pretty obvious. First, while it was possible to fill out your profile for free and look at others', so many things required a paid account: receiving mail, seeing who "liked" you, etc. And second, just how many "likes" and emails I received, even though I hadn't mailed anyone else. For a month or two after signing up, I was barraged with emails saying I had received personal messages from women, that tons of women had "liked" me, etc. Yeah, bullshit. I've been on OKC more than long enough to know that men almost never receive unsolicited messages from women (and when they do, those women usually aren't too desirable, sorry to say). There's no way I'm getting tons of emails from beautiful women after sticking up a profile and a couple of photos and doing little else. Anyway, I kept getting emails from match.com for 2-3 months after this, constantly trying to get me to come back, pay money to read these supposed messages, etc., but it finally stopped.
As far as I can tell, most of these dating sites these days are scams. OKCupid seems to be completely legit; I haven't seen anything that reeks of fakery there, however the male:female ratio is of course poor as you'd expect and women who are at all desirable get bombarded with messages from men. From what I've read, eHarmony seems to be legit, but it's also completely geared towards conservative Christians so if you're not one of those, then don't bother. AFAICT, Tinder is completely legit too, but it's not a site at all, really more of a hookup app and because of its lack of detailed profiles, doesn't facilitate finding compatible partners.
Match likes to boast about subscribers when most accounts are completely dead. No idea about bots, never used it so I don't have an impression.
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?
Ya, right. I hear this all the time.
Right. Old trick
Have gnu, will travel.
"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/
Where is the ratio of males to females 1:3? Have you already passed into heaven?
Apparently the Mormon community is nearly at that level, and young Mormon men are playing at it like kids in a candy store. There was an article about this that was kind of interesting: http://time.com/dateonomics/
"there are now 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men in the state of Utah—a 50 percent oversupply of women"
Unfortunately, they're Mormon women....so dating them is likely to be an exercise in frustration for any normal man.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
I've seen RealDolls, and that word clearly doesn't mean what you think it means. Either that, or you've never actually met a woman.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What has this to do with Fembots and the guys that "communicate" with them?
From what I've read, eHarmony seems to be legit, but it's also completely geared towards conservative Christians so if you're not one of those, then don't bother
No that's not true, I'm not religious and I used it to great effect, had many dates and secured a great long-term relationship (going on 3.5 years now.) This is actually the one with the most women, I think they outnumber men actually, because it's not a hookup dating site, it's a relationship/find-me-a-husband type site. All the gals I went out with were looking for a serious relationship. Mind you eharmony does do some annoying stuff like refuse to refund your auto-renewed subscription when you're finished with it etc. But nonetheless I remember having a pretty good experience with it. You get what you pay for.
Bastards..
Everything I've read about it indicates that it's mainly popular among social conservatives, partially because of the way their matching algorithm works and the assumptions it makes; is that not true? For instance, homosexuals are completely barred from using the site IIRC, as is anyone in an open relationship.
As for OKCupid, most of the women I see on there are also looking for a serious relationship (this isn't so true on Tinder, of course). But the ratio sucks.
Why do you say are you a real hot married woman not a bot?
Earlier you said something about your mother.
Tinder is completely legit too, but it's not a site at all, really more of a hookup app and because of its lack of detailed profiles, doesn't facilitate finding compatible partners.
if i've learned anything, it's that people don't know what they want. the proof is is in the number of divorces. in western culture people are free to couple with whoever they want, but they consistently pick the wrong person.
point being, i think your chances of finding a "soulmate" from a random hookup are as good as from OKCupid or some other site that purports to link you with your perfect match.
BTW, I did a little googling, and everything I found indicates that eHarmony is almost explicitly Christian; their site even refers to their Christian principles in places, and this leads some to criticize them for not clearly indicating that they're really only a site for Christians wanting to date, and are not open to everyone (which makes sense, they're liars who want other people to pay $$$ to join and then go away when it doesn't work out for them).
They don't even allow people who are separated to join.
You may be interested to know that Sam Yagan, who was the founder of OkCupid and now the CEO of match.com(?), at one point wrote a super-detailed blog post (including graphs and all) titled "why you should never pay for online dating", where he basically eviscerated the idea of paid dating sites.
Then match.com bought OkCupid and the post was taken down: http://observer.com/2011/02/ok...
Fortunately, as well all know, anything posted online is likely to never go away: http://static.izs.me/why-you-s...
Really a very interesting read.
This sounds good and all, but I looked at your static.izs.me link, and it says this article was written by a Christian Rudder in 2010, not Sam Yagan. The Observer article says Christian was OKC's "data hound". So Yagan didn't write this post, one of his employees did; he obviously had it taken down when it made him look bad. He even acknowledges this, but really it's pretty obvious he's changed his tune since back in '10 OKC was all about being free (except for ads), and then Yagan joined the dark side with the Match.com acquisition.
I have to disagree, to a point. People frequently have certain deal-breakers, which are basic points of compatibility. For instance, I have no interest in dating a smoker. I don't want someone like that in my life; I can't stand being around tobacco smoke and sure as hell don't want someone smoking in bed with me. That's a basic deal-breaker. But Tinder doesn't allow me to see that about people, whereas any other dating site has that as one of the basic parameters, so you could meet someone and start talking, meet them in person, and then find out they're just not relationship material because of a basic deal-breaker like this. This is just one example, other people have other (and multiple) deal-breakers; maybe they don't want to date someone who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, or who loves having a bunch of giant dogs and other animals around the house, etc. You may like someone, but that doesn't mean you can actually share a home with them if you can't get along on basic things.
In fact, I'd say the fact that *most* people don't screen people based on parameters like this (because most people do not find their partners on dating sites, but rather at bars or other meatspace places where these parameters are again not always apparent) could be one of the reasons the divorce rate is so high. You're right, people *aren't* picking well; they're using too much emotion, instead of screening people out who are simply bad matches for reasons like these, and then looking to see who they have chemistry with. They have some fairy-tale notion that they're going to run into Mr./Ms. Right at the supermarket or something and hit it off. Sure, you might meet someone attractive that you have chemistry with like that (or more likely, at a bar), but then it turns out you have serious compatibility problems. But if you've gotten emotionally attached already, you're likely to overlook that stuff, and then when you finally do break up, it's really messy, when you should have simply said "no thanks" right at the beginning.
Yes, I had a classic case of misremembering some details of the story and not double-checking before posting! Sorry. I just wanted you to read the original post since it touched some of the points that you were making, but went into a lot of detailed analysis.
I noticed after posting that someone had already posted the same story further down and been modded +5 too.