You see them every day. Blending in with the crowd. Faces on the other side of the internet, with pictures, names, words of their own. But they aren’t real. They were never real. They look and act almost right… but something’s off. Whether it’s trying to get you to buy something, or maybe think a certain way… They want something from you.
Is that person yelling about politics even real? You have to think about it because you’re not sure. You settle on real. Probably. It’s hard to tell these days, but… he sounded real, didn’t he? They keep getting better and better. More human, and less robot. Who knows how many times you’ve already been fooled by them?
How did we get here?
Hey there everyone, welcome to crickets campfire. We were on a bit of a hiatus for personal reasons there, but we’re back! And today we're going to talk about bots.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term bots. It's a pretty common buzzword when talking about the dangers of our very internet-centric lives. To the more tech-savvy, you'll already know what those are, but for clarity for everyone else, a bot is a program. A virtual robot, who only exists digitally. Sometimes they're as simple as a few lines of text, or much more in-depth code. These tasks are almost always repetitive, boring, time consuming tasks. No human would want to go and do these things every day. So someone writes a program to do these things. It cuts down immensely on the time a person has to devote to a website or task.
A lot of bots are tasked with collecting and consolidating information, collecting it from different sites, and putting it somewhere easy to find. They’re good at making things neat and organized. A good bot makes your experience on the internet smooth and often safer. A chatbot can monitor live conversations and weed out trouble makers. Maybe you see a bot telling people the weather on some social media platform. We’ve got hundreds of millions of them.
They can be so useful, and throughout your day, you’re probably being helped by an unknown number of them.
But then there are the other bots. The ones that don’t want you to ever know you came in contact with. Bots are set in place by bad actors. They steal your public information to sell, Email spam, lie to you, frustrate you… They’re the biggest flaw to the internet.
According to a study by Imperva, in 2019 about ⅓ of all traffic on the internet was created by bots. If that sounds high, that’s nothing compared to a few years ago. In 2014, only about 40% of online traffic was human.
Why are there so many? Well, at the root of that are a number of reasons, but the biggest will always be the same. Money. Is something paid per view? Videos, news articles, this podcast even. Every view is a currency, exchangeable for cash. Bots can generate that so easily that it’s tempting to send bots through to rake in those views. If there’s something on sale that you can sell down the line for big bucks? Scalper bots will buy up every copy before a human can even try. Tickets are a huge target for this. I’m sure you’ve all heard about how hard it still is to buy a PS5. You can bet that some bots helped scalpers get most of those.
Sometimes the motivation behind them is a little more obscure. DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service, are when you send a huge number of bots to a site, overwhelming it, and taking it down. They can be hard to deal with, sometimes even impossible.
There are other bots that just brute-force passwords. They get an email and just try passwords till they get in. They can do a lot of damage from there. Can you even count how many accounts are tied to your email?
Then there’s a specific kind of nefarious bot. The ones made to look and sound like real people. They’re on Twitter, parroting politics that their owners want you to believe. Telling you about how great a product is from some sketchy website. They ask innocuous questions, trying to get answers to security questions from you.
