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Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

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:

The Four Stages of Learning.

Don’t know; Don’t care.
Don’t know; Do care.
Do Know; Do care.
Do Know; Don’t Care.

via: Trivium

An Optical Poem is a visualization of Franz Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody made in 1938 by abstract film-maker Oskar Fischinger.

Filmed in stop-motion, all visual elements are hand-placed pieces of paper on wires.

Related: Music for the Eyes - Three takes on computer generated music visualization.