bots
Facebook and Instagram will now show location of posts from high-reach accounts targeting US audiences
Facebook today is introducing another feature aimed at making it easier to see who’s behind the posts published across Facebook and Instagram. The company says it will now display the location o
FedEx robot sent packing by NYC
FedEx’s autonomous delivery bot got a cold reception from New York City officials. After the company’s SameDay Bots — named Roxo — popped up on New York City streets last week, Mayor B
MIT’s self-propelled block robots can now manage basic swarm coordination
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has come up with a clever way for its small cube-like robots, which can move on their own, to communicate and coordinate with one an
Cloudflare has a new plan to fight bots — and climate change
Cloudflare is ratcheting up its fight against bots with a new “fight mode,” which it says will frustrate and disincentivize bot operators from their malicious activity. Bots are notorious
Shape Security hits $1B valuation with $51M Series F
Anti-fraud startup Shape Security has tipped over the $1 billion valuation mark following its latest Series F round of $51 million. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced the fundraise Thur
Bots are cheap and effective. One startup trolls them into going away
Bots are ruining the internet. When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train ticke
Robot couriers scoop up early-stage cash
Much of the last couple of decades of innovation has centered around finding ways to get what we want without leaving the sofa. But there’s a catch: We can't lie around ordering pizzas if someone st
Microsoft to acquire Xoxco as focus on AI and bot developers continues
Microsoft has been all in on AI this year, and in the build versus buy equation, the company has been leaning heavily toward buying. This morning, the company announced its intent to acquire Xoxco, an
Bots distorted the 2016 Election. Will the midterms be a sequel?
The fact that Russian-linked bots penetrated social media to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been well documented, and the details of the deception are still trickling out.
Twitter’s spam reporting tool now lets you specify type, including if it’s a fake account
Twitter is adding more nuance to its spam reporting tools, the company announced today. Instead of simply flagging a tweet as posting spam, users can now specify what kind of spam you’re seeing
Twilio launches Autopilot to help developers build better bots
Bots went through the hype cycle faster than a speeding roller coaster, as the promise of chatting with a computer quickly turned sour. Now, Twilio wants to take another stab at this market with the l
Twitter is considering badging bots — “as far as we can detect them”
At today’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked by vice chair Sen. Mark Warner whether users should have “a right to know” if they are talking to
Zendesk introduces support bot for Discord gaming community
The Discord gaming community boasts 150 million members and 46 million active monthly users, who spend their days chatting about games, finding people to play with and looking for advice on how to res
Duo Security researchers’ Twitter ‘bot or not’ study unearths crypto botnet
A team of researchers at Duo Security has unearthed a sophisticated botnet operating on Twitter — and being used to spread a cryptocurrency scam. The botnet was discovered during the course of a
Twitter’s efforts to suspend fake accounts have doubled since last year
Bots, your days of tweeting politically divisive nonsense might be numbered. The Washington Post reported Friday that in the last few months Twitter has aggressively suspended accounts in an effort to
Twitter puts a tighter squeeze on spambots
Twitter has announced a range of actions intended to bolster efforts to fight spam and “malicious automation” (aka bad bots) on its platform — including increased security measures a
BotChain wants to put bot-to-bot communication on the blockchain
Increasingly we are going to be having bots conducting business on a company’s behalf. As that happens, it is going to require a trust mechanism to ensure that bot-to-bot communication is legiti
Europe eyeing bot IDs, ad transparency and blockchain to fight fakes
European Union lawmakers want online platforms to come up with their own systems to identify bot accounts. This is as part of a voluntary Code of Practice the European Commission now wants platforms t
Bots on Twitter share two-thirds of links to popular websites: Pew
It’s official: Bots are doing a lot of PR grunt work on Twitter — especially when it comes to promoting porn websites. That perhaps unsurprising conclusion about what automated Twitter acc
Suspicious likes lead to researcher lighting up a 22,000-strong botnet on Twitter
Botnets are fascinating to me. Who creates them? What are they for? And why doesn't someone delete them? The answers are probably less interesting than I hope, but in the meantime I like to cheer when