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Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

theintercept.com

61–70 of 190 posts

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#61
post #58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy with that if we also got rid of Facebook and Reddit.

What's wrong with Reddit? If you're talking about the "default" config, then yes, it sucks. But if you curate the subreddits you follow, you can end up with a news aggregator that is superior to HN... Furthermore, the more specific the subreddit, the more in depth the discussions become.

You could say the same about Twitter and Facebook.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#62
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that's true, on Twitter as well as on Facebook, and it's pretty well documented at this point.

Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.

It's an understatement say that the development of critical thinking skills in US schools is lacking. For example, it's estimated that 1 out of 3 Americans believe that all life has existed in it's present form since the beginning of time.[1] Educating these people is difficult because they are trained by their parents and religious leaders to mistrust professors[2] and other experts from an early age. It's much easier to ban bots.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/republicans-...

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#63

A real hacker move would be to just leave Twitter and go to Mastodon https://joinmastodon.org

Would Twitter be allowed to federate if it implement the Mastodon protocol. Think carefully.

Yes, of course. However, if I'm not mistaken, each Mastodon server instance creates their own policies regarding what other servers can tweet to their users. So it would be trivial for any Mastodon server to "ban" Twitter users from posting in their instance.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#64
post #61
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Reddit? If you're talking about the "default" config, then yes, it sucks. But if you curate the subreddits you follow, you can end up with a news aggregator that is superior to HN... Furthermore, the more specific the subreddit, the more in depth the discussions become.

You could say the same about Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter is not an effective discussion platform imo. Facebook, in my experience at least, makes it pretty damned hard to find active, technical communities.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#65
post #52

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, bu…

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...

This. They clearly don’t care about keeping their platform authentic so stop using it.

Reddit is also getting worse and worse in this reguard by the month it seems.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#66
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not tackle the root problem?: Lack of critical thinking skills. I'm not from the US, so I don't know how extensive their philosophy courses are in school, but judging by these repetitive "Russians/bots are manipulating our people" headlines, it's probably lacking.

Yes: let's just go back and re-teach everyone. That is surely an easier solution to implement than banning Twitter bots.

Of course not but there’s not effort either being made to improve the current status for the future generations - quite the opposite actually.

States need to play the long game after all.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams. Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"

And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots. It's clear that Twit…

> And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed.

Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much.

So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#68
post #52

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking these accounts so I whipped up a quick proof of concept a while ago. The amount of trivial-to-detect cryptocurrency scams in replies to popular accounts was so high that I put together a hacky PoC: https://gist.github.com/lorenzhs/864353c202112a38de17ed054f3... -- the scammers' messages have changed now, the messages no longer match that particular filter, bu…

I got fed up with Twitter's lack of enthusiasm in blocking all sorts of shitposts that I stopped using it. I've been significantly less angry ever since...

Is it for some reason not a viable solution to just stop following people who shitpost? Or does Twitter push random users' posts at you? I ask because I've been circling around Twitter for a month or so, but if you can't isolate yourself from public tweets, I'm definitely not going to jump in.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#69
I frankly don't use twitter much anyway... I mostly post things that I like, and in the end use my own account to re-find stuff I posted later... it's a bad bookmark manager is how I use it, but at least then other people might find it useful to.

Re: Hackers Are So Fed Up with Twitter Bots They’re Hunting Them Down Themselves

#70
> finding these accounts is pretty easy, he used advanced google search and google reverse image search

All Twitter has to do is develop the most intelligent software ever created and make sure it keeps inching towards generalized AI over time.

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