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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.