A large number of Twitter users are bots. They can send spam, manipulate public opinion, and contaminate the Twitter API stream that underline so many research works. One of the major challenges of research on Twitter bots is the lack of ground truth data. Here we report our discovery of the Star Wars botnet with more than 350k bots. We show these bots were generated and centrally controlled by a botmaster. These bots exhibit a number of unique features, which reveal profound limitations of existing bot detection methods. Our work has significant implications for cybersecurity, not only because the size of the botnet is larger than those analysed before, but also because it has been well hidden since its creation in 2013. We argue that more research is needed to fully understand the potential security risks that a large, hidden botnet can pose to the Twitter environment, and research in general.

via https://twitter.com/dbarthjones/status/824328441369600000

Une vidéo intéressante sur l'automation et la robotisation galopante actuelle. Dans un proche futur, la majorité de la population sera sans emploi, puisque les machines nous aurons remplacé.

Or, nous ne sommes pas encore prêt pour cette société sans emploi. Le marché du travail est en voie de disparition. C'est une bonne nouvelle, somme toute...