Robots Have Taken Over the Internet

[longknife]

Tech | TIME.com by Denver Nicks

More than 60 percent of all Internet traffic now comes from bots, according to a new study. The study, published earlier this week by the web security firm Incapsula, found that online traffic from bots in 2013 — automated softwarethat include everything from hacking tools to spammers to search engine catalogers — is up 21 percent from 2012, when 51 percent of website visits already came from bots. Thirty-one percent of bots are malicious, according to the study, but spam bots decreased from two percent of traffic last year to half-a-percent in 2013. The report includes evidence of more sophisticated hacker activity, including an eight percent increase in so-called “Other Impersonators,” hostile bots that attempt to impersonate benign bots and tend to be specifically crafted for a particular malicious activity.

I don't understand the full meaning of this but it doesn't read as all that good. What are “bots” and can they impersonate real people? [Comes from a long-standing belief that some posters on forums are real people or are there because of a search engine for certain topics] Read the article @ Internet: Bots Responsible for More than 60% of All Web Traffic | TIME.com

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd says dat's why he can't find a job...

Growth of AI could lead to ‘a handful of gods and the rest of us’
Tue, Nov 10, 2015 - A report suggests that the marriage of artificial intelligence and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end

If you wanted relief from stories about tire factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BOA), which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution. However, you might not end up reassured. Though it promises robot carers for an aging population, it also forecasts huge numbers of jobs being wiped out: up to 35 percent of all workers in the UK and 47 percent of those in the US, including white-collar jobs, seeing their livelihoods taken away by machines.

Have not we heard all this before, though? From the luddites of the 19th century to print unions protesting in the 1980s about computers, there have always been people fearful about the march of mechanization. And yet we keep on creating new job categories. However, there are still concerns that the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) — which is able to make logical inferences about its surroundings and experience — married to ever-improving robotics, would wipe away entire swaths of work and radically reshape society.

“The poster child for automation is agriculture,” says Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI and the novel Pandora’s Brain. “In 1900, 40 percent of the US labor force worked in agriculture. By 1960, the figure was a few percent. And yet people had jobs; the nature of the jobs had changed. “But then again, there were 21 million horses in the US in 1900. By 1960, there were just 3 million. The difference was that humans have cognitive skills — we could learn to do new things. But that might not always be the case as machines get smarter and smarter.”

HORSES AND HUMANS

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Tech | TIME.com by Denver Nicks

More than 60 percent of all Internet traffic now comes from bots, according to a new study. The study, published earlier this week by the web security firm Incapsula, found that online traffic from bots in 2013 — automated softwarethat include everything from hacking tools to spammers to search engine catalogers — is up 21 percent from 2012, when 51 percent of website visits already came from bots. Thirty-one percent of bots are malicious, according to the study, but spam bots decreased from two percent of traffic last year to half-a-percent in 2013. The report includes evidence of more sophisticated hacker activity, including an eight percent increase in so-called “Other Impersonators,” hostile bots that attempt to impersonate benign bots and tend to be specifically crafted for a particular malicious activity.

I don't understand the full meaning of this but it doesn't read as all that good. What are “bots” and can they impersonate real people? [Comes from a long-standing belief that some posters on forums are real people or are there because of a search engine for certain topics] Read the article @ Internet: Bots Responsible for More than 60% of All Web Traffic | TIME.com

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