Incoming messages for straight men on dating sites are… rare. Yet many of the dashing men who tried out Ashley Madison, a site aimed at the already-married, got messages soon after signing up. To see the messages, the men had to pay. The more perceptive among them soon noticed that their pen pals wrote similar come-ons, logged in and out at the same time every day, and oddest of all, had not visited the men’s profiles. Ashley Madison was using more than 70,000 bots to lure in users, Gizmodo found in a 2015 investigation.
The message-sending profiles were one iteration of a growing army of bots that populate our online social networks, affecting everything from our wallets to our politics. Now they are attracting academic study and government research dollars. Continue reading Taxonomy Goes Digital: Getting a Handle on Social Bots→
When general store owner Melchor Villanueva leans on his countertop he can see his whole world under his hands. The counter’s glass surface displays photos of his community: young soccer players, teens in their coming-of-age quince años finest, and bandanna-wearing fishermen. Many descend from survivors of Hurricane Janet, which in 1955 killed a third of the population of Xcalak, a beach town on the Mexico-Belize border, and destroyed the town’s coconut plantations. “It left only sand,” Villanueva recalls. Continue reading Trial and error in a Mexican beach town→
Cuando el dueño de la tienda de abastos Melchor Villanueva se inclina sobre el mostrador puede ver todo su mundo bajo sus manos. El vidrio del mostrador muestra fotos de su comunidad: jóvenes futbolistas, jóvenes vestidas con sus mejores galas para sus fiestas de quince años, y pescadores con pañuelos contra el sol. Muchos descienden de los supervivientes del huracán Janet, que en 1955 mató a una tercera parte de la población de Xcalak, una ciudad costera en la frontera de México con Belice, y destruyó las plantaciones de cocoteros del pueblo. “Acá dejó solo arena”, recuerda Villanueva. Continue reading Ensayo y error en un pueblo playero de México→
In mid-October 2016, officials from China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection counted five illegal trash-burning sites and hundreds of thousands of vehicles exceeding emission standards in Beijing alone. For the first time since last winter’s pollution high season, city officials issued a yellow air-quality alert, which required shutting down power plants and reining in Beijing’s frenetic factories and road traffic. If this winter is anything like past winters, the city will have to pull out the yellow card again—and may even have to reach for its red card.
Read the rest of this news story in the January issue of IEEE Spectrum or the updated online version: [html] [pdf].
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
