Internet Bots for Fun & No Profit
My talk from last November’s BSides Winnipeg 2013 Security Conference.
I spoke about @abotlafia, my Twitter bot inspired by the “bot” in Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum.
To show how little code is required to create automated accounts on Twitter I demo’d a few other bots that I’ve written. Here’s one that Tweets out a random number every five minutes. A modern day Numbers Station.
require 'chatterbot/dsl'
loop do
tweet rand(1000000..99000000).to_s
sleep 300
end
I closed with my motivations, the security/ethical implications of algorithmic social media accounts, and the possibility of a future where we are unable to determine who is real and who is a bot on the Internet.
The slides are online, as is the Ruby source code for the bots I wrote for the talk.
BSides Winnipeg 2013 was a two day B-Sides security conference held at the King’s Head in November 2013. All the talks are available online.
UPDATE - Abotlafia’s response to my talk:
@stungeye “you’re in trouble? good.”
— Abulafia (@abotlafia) November 25, 2014