Dozens of Tech Bigwigs Friend Facebook Spambot 81
jfruhlinger writes "If you've used Facebook or Twitter, you're almost certainly familiar with 'bimbots' — accounts that have profile pics of attractive women, but seem to exist only to send send spam links with varying degrees of subtlety. Henry Copeland, the founder of BlogAds, tracks the social network of one such Facebook bot, and finds that she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks. Copeland also tracks down the origin of the photo that accompanies the account."
Hot Bot (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
What does having fingers or not have to do with it?
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on what particular pleasures you want from it, I suppose.
Re: (Score:2)
Fingers? Wow.
Okay. Sit down. I am little surprised we have to have this talk because you are on the Internet... but...
You see Johnny, when two people really like each other......
Re: (Score:1)
Woosh on your woosh: both posts were in jest.
Unless of course your woosh was also a joke, then woosh on me.
Ah, to woosh with it all.
Re: (Score:2)
You're promoting a bad precedent.
These bimbots look good, but all they do is try to get you to buy lots of stuff that has nothing to do with the reason you approached them in the first place.
If you're looking for quality sexbots, then you're going to have to pay full price. These bimbots will just tease and taunt you without really delivering anything worthwhile.
Come to think of it, that's one of the oldest tricks of the oldest profession: it's easier to talk the mark out of his money than to actually work
Meh (Score:2)
A profile pic of a moderately attractive woman? That's it?
Now for me to be lured in, there would have to be regular posts, with pics, about things like:
"Washed my car in a bikini top and Daisy Duke shorts today. Got all wet. Tee hee! ;-)"
"Took some pics on my sportbike while I was outside."
"Had this fruit freezy at lunch today. Tastes so good. See how much I enjoy it? Mmmmmm...."
"How do these new shoes look? Ignore the very short skirt, just look at the shoes."
"Decided to drop rose petals on my bed and pose
Reminds me of the AIM days (Score:1)
Who wasn't a friend of SmarterChild?
In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Executives are not very computer savvy. And this is a surprise because....
Re: (Score:2)
Well, TFA is Slashdotted, but TFS seems to indicate that these are tech bigwigs.
If the executives of your tech company aren't computer savvy ... then maybe the reason your business is in the shitter is because your executives don't understand what it is that you do because they're a bunch of MBAs who don't know your industry well enough.
I'm sorry, but if you're running a tech company, you have no excuse for not being computer savvy.
Re: (Score:2)
You can run a tech company and not be computer savvy, provided you have the ability to keep investors continue to leave their wallets open. This was true in the dot.com bubble, and still true today, although it takes a far glibber tongue to keep investors shelling out the cash than in the past where scraping "LINUX" on something meant a multi million dollar IPO.
Re: (Score:2)
You can run a tech company and not be computer savvy, provided you have the ability to keep investors continue to leave their wallets open.
Of course. I think what Parent was saying is that better than this philosophy you identify is to implement an ethos of doing the job well. As this case illustrates, that would have been a better approach to take than focusing on "keeping investors' wallets open." Funnily enough, doing the job well is often a better approach, no matter what your jaded perspective on American commercialism may be (which actually feeds into the corrupt mentality of faking goods to get money).
Re: (Score:2)
Long term, doing the job well is the better approach. However, being in the industry so long, it is easy to get cynical, after bids/proposals for doing a job right get shoved off the table for ones that are cheaper, regardless of potential cost in safety, security, or long term sustainability.
I have consulted at a number of startups. The #1 thing that was the focus was keeping the investor wallets open. Everything else, up to and including making a solid product came second.
The old-school American ethos
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with that is when you first start out you can't afford mainframes. Then later you have folks who never have seen much less administered main frames.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
But of course what's more likely is that these facebook pages are not in any way personal pages. They will be maintained by some corporate minion who has a dozen other more important things to be doing for their boss, and who just accepts all friend requests. No-one seriously believes that they're "friends", even by facebook standards.
Chances are that these people, if they have a personal facebook page at all, keep it well under wraps.
Re: (Score:2)
The TFA is now 404'd...
Now there is truly "nothing to see here, move along".
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
I got "Internal Server Error", which is a 500 ... maybe if we keep trying, we can collect the whole set. :-P
I'm not so sure (Score:3)
I'm not so sure, actually. Some of the absolute worst PHB's I've ever had the misfortune to work with, weren't MBA types, but former brilliant coders. They're the guys who thought they're still expert enough to take tech decisions by themselves, just because they once coded some clever calculations in FORTRAN and subscribe to some IT-for-managers ragazine. The fact that a lot still had the typical nerd personality of just having to be right about everything, and taking even the theoretical possibility of th
Re: (Score:2)
I don't expect you to be able to code, but I don't expect you to be a friggin' n00b either.
In the tech industry if you can't write some kind of code, you are definitely a friggin' n00b.
Re: (Score:2)
Hot women/Sex sells. :P
Duh (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Because if they're proper nerds, they understand that that "hot girl" is actually just another tubby, pockmarked, unkempt, pizza-sauce-stained, geeky dude like themselves.
Yeah, but (Score:3)
Yeah, but also for a lot of people the number of "friends" they have on some list, is some kind of self-validation and status symbol.
To understand what I'm about to say, I must mention Dunbar's Number [wikipedia.org], which mans basically for a given species, how many relationships you can juggle around in your head. For Homo Sapiens that's a little under 150. The most primitive tribes can work without any form of organization below that number, for example, by simple virtue of everyone being friends with everyone else in
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook might not reliably enforce that for the long term , but most people don't care that much.
I know every single one of my friends (Score:2)
I know every single one of my friends... but most of my account privacy settings allow "friends of friends" to see my stuff and comment on it.
I'm just plain careful what I post on Facebook that's all... most of my stuff is throwaway weird random stuff
Go ahead.... friend me "Thomas Dzubin"
Re: (Score:2)
I know every single one of my friends... but most of my account privacy settings allow "friends of friends" to see my stuff and comment on it.
I'm just plain careful what I post on Facebook that's all... most of my stuff is throwaway weird random stuff
Go ahead.... friend me "Thomas Dzubin"
and when I say "friend me", I mean... hot girl bots... "friend me"
not random Slashdot nerds. sigh... I already know enough of them.
Re: (Score:2)
What I do is use groups, and have defaults of who can see what.
I started this after I graduated college because virtually every employer I applied for demanded friend access to FB. So, they got it. They could read a couple sterile posts. The rest? No access.
So, if someone I don't know wants to friend me, I'll accept the request and put them in the "deny access to all" group, and move merrily along.
Of course, one never knows if FB may "update" privacy settings to screw this way of doing things up, so it
Re: (Score:1)
I find this utterly amazing. Can you say what career field this was happening to you in? And were they not savvy enough to know they weren't seeing your full profile?
Re: (Score:2)
Computer science and IT.
At first, I didn't even have a FB profile. However, when interviewing, I was looked at like I was an alien, or one of those weird hermits who doesn't have a phone or electricity.
So I created a dummy FB account. Then started using it to reconnect with acquaintances. The same HR people who demanded friends with FB were doing so because it was the "in" thing as per their magazines. None of them ever mentioned that they were not seeing the full profile.
Funny thing is that the place t
Re: (Score:1)
Not suprising at all (Score:5, Insightful)
she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks
If these people are influential or media folks as it says, then they probably have tons of requests all the time. They are "important" people that love to be heard. The more followers/friends/whatever they have the better. They aren't going to spend a lot of time sifting through the requests to see who's real or not.
Re: (Score:3)
In fairness, a significant part of their jobs as corporate executives is to be heard by as many people as possible. Not to mention that by virtue of their jobs they most likely meet hundreds, if not thousands of people every year. This whole thing is kind of ridiculous; they're public figures, their use cases for Facebook are different from the average person. Where I would recommend to most people that they personally know every person on their friends list, that advice doesn't make sense for people usi
Re: (Score:2)
Question: Are they doing the friending/sifting/etc, or are their PA's/secretaries/admins doing it?
No joke... most CxO types would probably have their staff do that kind of scut-work for them.
Story link is to "blogads.com" (Score:2)
The story link is to "blogads.com". So this story is probably a spam.
Re:Story link is to "blogads.com" (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's a blog post written by the founder of BlogAds, like the summary says. He's FB friends with a lot of these folks, which is why he noticed. It's not promoting BlogAds as a company.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/blog.web.blogads.com [mywot.com]
How surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure most of these bigwigs are not actually managing their own social network profile, and that the Public Relations drone or Image Consultant who runs it for them is under instructions to accept all friend requests.
They are more like fan pages than personal accounts.
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't matter, in fact it's a boon to whoever wrote the bimbots because then the account will have a lot more "friends" for the bimbot to extract exposed information from.
/.'ed (Score:3)
/.'ed already. Anyone know who the "influential" execs are? Even better, got a picture of this babe? :-)
Full article (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the article from Google's cache:
Are you also exposing your private parts to strangers on Facebook?
by henrycopeland
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
Think it’s only old men in trench coats and — ahem — congressmen who like to share intimate moments with attractive strangers?
Based on my own Facebook experience, I’ve seen at least 100 influential tech, media and politics folks — men and some women — accept friend requests from attractive women they don’t know. For as lo
Re: (Score:2)
Any hint of normal human sexuality should be crushed immediately and the person in question must be publicly humiliated. The Bible tells us that our only source of pleasure should be giving money to churches and praying on bloody knees.
[Citation Needed]
I know you are just pointing out the hypocrisy of American culture which pushes sex in advertisements and media, but then publicly scorns any and every public figure who allows the fact that they aren't complete asexual prudes to become common knowledge. You're right about that. However, you are mistaking the way Western culture -- particularly American culture -- has interpreted the Bible with what it really says. Anyone who thinks that the Bible teaches that sex is always evil shoul
Re: (Score:2)
Any hint of normal human sexuality should be crushed immediately and the person in question must be publicly humiliated. The Bible tells us that our only source of pleasure should be giving money to churches and praying on bloody knees.
[Citation Needed]
I know you are just pointing out the hypocrisy of American culture which pushes sex in advertisements and media, but then publicly scorns any and every public figure who allows the fact that they aren't complete asexual prudes to become common knowledge. You're right about that. However, you are mistaking the way Western culture -- particularly American culture -- has interpreted the Bible with what it really says. Anyone who thinks that the Bible teaches that sex is always evil should really try reading it sometime. I'd recommend starting with Song of Solomon [biblegateway.com] and also 1 Corinthians 7:3-4 [biblegateway.com]. In Genesis 1:28 [biblegateway.com], God is reported to have said to people, "Be fruitful and multiply ." Any idea how they were supposed to do that without sex? Then, Genesis 2:25 [biblegateway.com] says that "They were naked and NOT ashamed(!)"
And Genesis 2:25 was in the Garden of Eden, and prior to the original sin/fall of man. It is followed by Genesis 3:7 [biblegateway.com]: "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves."
Seriously, trying to use Genesis 2:25 to say that humans shouldn't be ashamed to be naked is like saying that lions and lambs should lay down to sleep together. According to Christian theology, that no longer applies to the world.
Re: (Score:2)
According to Christian theology, that no longer applies to the world.
The problem with saying something like that is that Christians, as a whole, are a lot like /. as a whole: there is no such thing. Here on /., there are liberals, libertarians and conservatives. There are atheists, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Islamics, and pagans. There are Windows fanboys, Mac fanboys, and Linux fanboys. Likewise, saying that "Christians believe ${theology}" is an oversimplification.
And Genesis 2:25 was in the Garden of Eden, and prior to the original sin/fall of man. It is followed by Genesis 3:7 [biblegateway.com]: "At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves."
Yes, I was stretching a bit to use Genesis 2:25 in my point above, but I maintain that I wasn'
Re: (Score:2)
Even better, got a picture of this babe? :-)
Honestly, I was not impressed. Maybe she just isn't my type, but I found her to be slightly average looking. Nothing at all impressive or special about her.
Re: (Score:2)
Just go watch / friend http://nixiepixel.com/ [nixiepixel.com] while you're waiting. And maybe also http://watchtheguild.com/ [watchtheguild.com] while you're at it, though Felicia Day is not *quite* as nerdcore.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1179953216&sk=friends [facebook.com]
Photo apparently stolen from: (Score:2)
Photo apparently stolen from here:
http://journal.crossfit.com/2005/10/getting-off-the-crack-by-nicol.tpl [crossfit.com]
Research? (Score:1)
How in the world could they hope to address this problem without first fully understanding it?
This is getting old (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Advertisements and spam will only go away if the cost to the originator damages his business case. Ignoring the problem is an attempt at symptomatic relief, and does nothing about the root cause of the problem.
Irony much? (Score:2)
Link in article is to: blog.web.blogads.com
Claims to publicity are great but... (Score:2)
Then what happens is you have Sony, you have Citi, and you have numerous other smaller gaffes that I don' t really need to enumerate here.
You want publicity, fine... but make it a one way road. Don't even give
he almost fell for it! wtf? (Score:2)
Uh, right.
I get friend requests; if I don't know who they are, they get rejected. Why would I accept a FR from a complete stranger? If 40 of my friends know the person, I'd probably know them, or of them too.
Some people just need to take their brain out of Neutral; Drive preferably, but even Reverse would be better than nothing.
How do you know it's a spambot (Score:2)
This is news...? (Score:2)
That Famous People (or more likely their media relations people) are as susceptible to social engineering as the rest of us is news... how?
It's just the Backlash to Virtual Community (Score:1)
It boggles the mind.
Web of Trust says don't read TFA (Score:2)
Stupid Story (Score:1)
Nicole Carroll (Score:2)
A quick search on the picture with Tineye.com returns the name Nicole Carroll, who posts about nutrition and dieting on crossfit.com:
http://journal.crossfit.com/2005/10/getting-off-the-crack-by-nicol.tpl [crossfit.com]
The original thumbnail is here:
http://journal.crossfit.com/images/thumbnails/nicole.baeef534.png [crossfit.com]
Friending people you don't know ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In the process of "friending" them you can choose to put them on a friends list where they can't see anything on you and your relationships that's not already on your public profile, while you can see everything they allow to their facebook friends - e.g. who their friends are, photos of them, wall posts etc.
That way you can do stuff like figure out who the person might be. There are people who put cartoon characters or random pics as their d
What I know is... (Score:2)
... if I get a "friend" request ( or whatever the site names it), and it's an attractive female, i think a few things:
1. It's fake
2. It's some chick with some horrible mental problems to want to be friends with me.
Yep, only 2 things. So i just ignore it.
Seriously, why would i want to be friends with someone I don't know?
I don't like being friends with half the people I already know.