Weaponized drones, Ashley Madison, Facebook’s new virtual assistant and artificial intelligence are all in the news this week.
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THE RUN DOWN
Ashley Madison was nothing but a honeypot
Ashley Madison is still in the news. Gizmodo is reporting that hardly any of the real women on Ashley Madison actually used the site. Salon says that the number of fake female accounts is close to 95% which sounds about right from my experience. Like I’ve mentioned on the show a few times most of the women on the site are bots. By most, I mean, I don’t think I ever spoke to a single real person the entire time I was on the site. So, there were only about 5.5 million female accounts, meaning that there were only about 250 thousand real women on the website.
To make things even worse for Avid Life Media, of those 250 thousand women, a very small number of them actually used the site. Only about 2400 used the chat system and 1,400 used the messaging system. Considering the site also had 31.3 million men, and the site billed itself as a place to find women who wanted to have an affair, that is pretty rough for the company. It looks like they didn’t have the product to sell, so they built bots. Lots of the accounts have email addresses like 100@ashleymadison.com.
Ashley Madison CEO gets the “mutual agreement” boot
So, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that Avid Life Media CEO Noel Biderman, has quit his job as CEO ? “in mutual agreement with the company.”
A company that sold a service so crappy that women barely signed up for it, so the company had to make bots, and the site was so insecure that all of its data was dumped on the Internet. Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t want to keep him around.
That being said, we are happy to say, this is the last time we are going to talk about Ashley Madison, Established Gentlemen or Avid Life Media, hopefully for a long time.
Facebook launches new virtual assistant “M”
Following in the footsteps of Apple?s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft?s Cortana, Facebook unveiled a new virtual assistant this week that they?re calling ?M.?
M will be built into the Facebook Messenger app. Unlike its competitors, M is – at least for the time being – is entirely text based.
As Wired reports, there is another huge difference between M and the other virtual assistants: M will use a hybrid of artificial intelligence and real people to complete tasks.
A team of employees called ?M trainers? will work alongside the software to make sure every question and request is answered. Facebook says M will offer a true personal assistant experience by helping users book restaurants, pick out and deliver gifts and more.
During internal employee testing, one of the most popular requests for M was to call the user?s cable company so they wouldn?t have sit through long wait lines and automated messages.
David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, says they are also looking for a way to partner with businesses that get a lot of requests through M.
Facebook is currently doing a trial run for M with a few hundred users in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Facebook Hits 1 Billion Visitors A Day
Speaking of The Facebook, the Associated Press reported this week that the social media behemoth hit a major milestone as one billion users visited the site in a single day. Facebook hit a billion users back in 2012, but there is a significant difference between having a billion users and having a billion people actually logging onto your site and using it every day. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg celebrated the milestone in a Facebook post, stating that this meant that 1 out of every 7 people on earth had logged onto the site that day.
North Dakota legalizes armed police drones
NPR reports that North Dakota has passed a law legalizing use of drones armed with ?less than lethal? weapons by law enforcement. Less than lethal weapons apparently include tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, pepper spray and Tasers. The bill?s sponsor, Republican State Senator Becker said that the bill was actually intended to require police to get warrants before using drones for surveillance. In order to pass the bill, however, compromises had to be included. Becker says that he hopes to get the weaponization part of the bill overturned in a future session.
Arrrrrrr-tificial Intelligence Predicts Pirate Attacks
Our next story is about the rapidly growing field of Arrrrrr-tificial intelligence. David Nield at Science Alert reports that the Navy has filed a patent for a computerized system that can predict pirate attacks based on previous intelligence, weather, and other factors. Modern day piracy is a real problem, costing the US maritime industry an estimated $16 billion per year. The Navy?s pirate attack computer model would be able to simulate attacks by large numbers of ?virtual pirates? and generate probability estimates of when and where pirate attacks are most likely to take place.
Uber hires Jeep hackers
Regular listeners will remember that not long ago we talked about the two hackers who were able to take control of a Jeep?s engine and brakes through its uConnect system. The hack made such big headlines that it caused Fiat Chrysler to issue a recall. Well Engadget reports that this week Uber announced that it had hired the men behind the hack, Charlie Miller and Chris Valacek, to work at its Advanced Technology Center in Pennsylvania. Like other tech companies, Uber is known to be exploring the possibilities of autonomous cars. Making sure that your driverless car has robust security to keep it from being remotely controlled by a hacker is probably a smart move.
BEM Twitter Account
Just wanted to share a great Twitter account I just discovered: Bored Elon Musk. This parody account purports to be the downtime thoughts of Musk, the inventor, entrepreneur and cofounder of Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX.
Photo credit: “Don’t Taze Me, Drone!” by Ray Hollister is a derivative work of “Project 365 #121: 010515 Attack Of The Drones!” by Pete used under CC BY 2.0.