Robot Librarians Are Fighting Robot Thieves For Control Of The Internet
DID you know that 61% of all web traffic is created by robots? A new report from web security company Incapsula says robots read the web more than humans. The company spotted at 1.45 billion bots from 20,000 websites over three months. Of the 61% robots, 31% are malicious.
Dr Ian Brown, associate director at Oxford University’s Cyber Security Centre, tells the BBC:
“Their own customers may or may not be representative of the wider web. There will also be some unavoidable fuzziness in their data, given that they are trying to measure malicious website visits where by definition the visitors are trying to disguise their origin.”
Frederic Lardinois ponders:
At first glance, this sounds like this means the number of nefarious attacks is up, but Incapsula actually notes that the bulk of growth in this number is due to what it calls “good bots.” Visits from certified agents from search engines and similar tools increased from 20 percent to 31 percent, for example. According to Incapsula, many search engines have lately increased their sampling rates. In addition, the SEO tools that try to help websites rank higher once they are crawled, also now often visit sites more often than ever before.
Robot librarians.
Alexis Madrigal wonders what robots buy and contribute:
The point is: It’s so easy to build bots that do various things that they are overrunning the human traffic on the web. Now, to understand the human web, we have to reckon with the logic of the non-human web. It is, in part, shady traffic that allows ad networks and exchanges to flourish. And these automated ad buying platforms — while they do a lot of good, no doubt about it — also put pressure on other publishers to sell ads more cheaply. When they do that, there’s less money for content, and the content quality suffers. The ease of building bots, in other words, hurts what you read each and every day on the Internet.
Jamie Frevele reaches out:
That’s nearly a third of the entire internet out to destroy the internet. Creepy. Well, in the spirit of making nice with our robotic overlords, here is a friendly greeting in binary:
0101000001101100011001010110000101110011011001010010000001100
10001101111011011100010011
1011101000010000001101000011101010111001001110100001000
00011101010111001100101110001000
00010100110110010101110010011010010110111101110101011100110110110001
1110010010110000100
00001110111011001010010000001101010011101010111001101110100001000000
1110111011000010110
1110011101000010000001110100011011110010000001110000011011110111001101
110100001000000110000101100010011011110111010101110100001000000100010001101111
01100011011101000110111101
110010001000000101011101101000011011110010111000100000
They invade at dawn.
Posted: 15th, December 2013 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
