Mark30339’s comment reminds me of:
“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Orwell

Cornflour’s comment reminds of the moment when Sarah Palin was selected as the VP candidate. I watched the TV coverage for about an hour and then went to the Palin Wiki page. Then I saw that there were 200 accepted edits to that page in the last hour. I assumed those were all human editors, but who knows?

The URL is https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602421/the-growing-problem-of-bots-that-fight-online/

The article’s main purpose is to review an interesting paper about bots that fight each other over Wikipedia edits. At what point will robots dominate internet traffic? Will people then be marginal? How will that change laws and regulations governing the internet? Seems like I know less and less.

Here are a couple of excerpts that hint at the volume of bot traffic.

“By some measures, bots account for 49 percent of visits to Web pages and are responsible for over 50 percent of clicks on ads. This impact is set to increase as the number of bots rises exponentially.”

“One group has estimated that in 2009, a quarter of all tweets were generated by bots.”

On a personal level, they have even suckered home buyers to wire money (20% down) to a wrong account causing the loss of their current and future home.

What I meant by “I have no idea why” was something far more specific than that.

In other words, I didn’t know and still don’t know what vulnerability the spammers exploited. I have no idea what the actual mechanism was. I would need to know that in order to do anything about it. I certainly have a very general idea why in terms of the basic principle—the spammers changed something or other that got around something or other in the spam blocking system. That happens in living systems and elsewhere, of course.

yes you do
its an example of punctuated progress in evolution
duh

progress stalls till something is found, then it piles through the opening till the other side finds something, and makes their progress which then makes it moribund

you can see this all over
but why look?

I understand that Neo’s commenters aren’t generally a techie crowd, but there seem to be a few exceptions, so I thought I’d ask.

Yep. I tried opening the ssh port on my machine for a while so I could access it remotely. After a couple of weeks reading the logs of how many attempts were made to get in through that port I closed it up again. I didn’t think it likely that anyone would make it through, but why worry about it? The marginal utility wasn’t worth it.