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You see them every day. Blending in with the crowd. Faces on the other side of the internet, with pictures, names, words of their own. But they aren\u2019t real. They were never real. They look and act almost right\u2026 but something\u2019s off. Whether it\u2019s trying to get you to buy something, or maybe think a certain way\u2026 They want something from you.\n\tIs that person yelling about politics even real? You have to think about it because you\u2019re not sure. You settle on real. Probably. It\u2019s hard to tell these days, but\u2026 he sounded real, didn\u2019t he? They keep getting better and better. More human, and less robot. Who knows how many times you\u2019ve already been fooled by them?\n\tHow did we get here?\n\tHey there everyone, welcome to crickets campfire. We were on a bit of a hiatus for personal reasons there, but we\u2019re back! And today we're going to talk about bots.\n\tI\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard the term bots. It's a pretty common buzzword when talking about the dangers of our very internet-centric lives. To the more tech-savvy, you'll already know what those are, but for clarity for everyone else, a bot is a program. A virtual robot, who only exists digitally. Sometimes they're as simple as a few lines of text, or much more in-depth code. These tasks are almost always repetitive, boring, time consuming tasks. No human would want to go and do these things every day. So someone writes a program to do these things. It cuts down immensely on the time a person has to devote to a website or task.\n\tA lot of bots are tasked with collecting and consolidating information, collecting it from different sites, and putting it somewhere easy to find. They\u2019re good at making things neat and organized. A good bot makes your experience on the internet smooth and often safer. A chatbot can monitor live conversations and weed out trouble makers. Maybe you see a bot telling people the weather on some social media platform. We\u2019ve got hundreds of millions of them.\n\tThey can be so useful, and throughout your day, you\u2019re probably being helped by an unknown number of them. \n\tBut then there are the other bots. The ones that don\u2019t want you to ever know you came in contact with. Bots are set in place by bad actors. They steal your public information to sell, Email spam, lie to you, frustrate you\u2026 They\u2019re the biggest flaw to the internet. \n\tAccording to a study by Imperva, in 2019 about \u2153 of all traffic on the internet was created by bots. If that sounds high, that\u2019s nothing compared to a few years ago. In 2014, only about 40% of online traffic was human.\n\tWhy are there so many? Well, at the root of that are a number of reasons, but the biggest will always be the same. Money. Is something paid per view? Videos, news articles, this podcast even. Every view is a currency, exchangeable for cash. Bots can generate that so easily that it\u2019s tempting to send bots through to rake in those views. If there\u2019s something on sale that you can sell down the line for big bucks? Scalper bots will buy up every copy before a human can even try. Tickets are a huge target for this. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve all heard about how hard it still is to buy a PS5. You can bet that some bots helped scalpers get most of those.\n\tSometimes the motivation behind them is a little more obscure. DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service, are when you send a huge number of bots to a site, overwhelming it, and taking it down. They can be hard to deal with, sometimes even impossible. \n\tThere are other bots that just brute-force passwords. They get an email and just try passwords till they get in. They can do a lot of damage from there. Can you even count how many accounts are tied to your email?\n\tThen there\u2019s a specific kind of nefarious bot. The ones made to look and sound like real people. They\u2019re on Twitter, parroting politics that their owners want you to believe. Telling you about how great a product is from some sketchy website. They ask innocuous questions, trying to get answers to security questions from you.