bots

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

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

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

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

If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a hu

We live in world where bots are operating all over the internet. Like Glinda in the Wizard of Oz asking Dorothy if she is a good witch or a bad witch, network admins simply want to determine if a bot

Twitter has provided updated details on its investigation into Russian election interference on its platform in 2016. Its identification of more than 13,000 more Russian-linked bots that made election

Just a few weeks ago I was in Utah for the holidays, spending time with the many family members my husband and I both have there. At one family gathering, a cousin began talking about how he bought a

For as much as its users love to hate on their platform of choice, Twitter occasionally really comes through with a deep dive on a hot topic that provides actual, meaningful insight. Such an event is

Buying event tickets online isn't a great experience. Sites like Ticketmaster are the default, but are difficult to use and expensive. A startup called Lea wants to offer a more modern experience by c

Remember Ello? I recently wrote about this social networking site's comeback. Since then, a handful of you have pinged me about its spam bot problem. Just yesterday, another person came forward to tel

At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company’s internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that pl

Research conducted by a group of data scientists looking at how information was diffused on Twitter around the June 2016 EU referendum vote suggests more than 150,000 Russian accounts were involved in

This week on Technotopia I talk to Chris Boos, the creator of a bot that can play FreeCiv, a Civilization clone. His solution demonstrates the power of machine learning and, wildly, has beaten multipl

It’s been just over a year since Salesforce introduced Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence technologies that are designed to underlie and enhance the Salesforce product set. Today, at Dr

If you’ve ever wondered if the hashtag heavy, politically far afield Twitter user you’re about to eviscerate in 140 characters is totally delusional or merely not quite sentient, well, won

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from

Emilio Ferrara has been thinking about botnets for over a decade. As the first social networks climbed out of the mire, he noticed that they were very easy to game. Now, it seems, all of those early t

According to Emilio Ferrara, a USC Information Sciences Institute researcher, not all Twitter bots are born bad. He should know. Ferrara created a “large-scale experiment designed to analyze the