Machine-Based Investigation: Fully →

via Motherboard writer Michael Byrne, comes this well-wrought piece on the apparent proliferation of 'bots on Twitter, ie., the implications of algorithm-driven entities on the Twitterverse. The fascinating component to this study by Onur Varol, Emilio Ferrara, Clayton A. Davis, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini, was the utilization of a machine-learning apparatus (and the feature-sets therein) to tease out the truth. Additional documentation (in the form of the paper) is available on arXIv. Today's MustRead.

"Part of what makes the new research interesting is the sheer number of features used in the classification model..." - Motherboard's Michael Byrne

Fingered →

Relatively new fingerprinting techniques were brought to my attention last week (H/T), that (reportedly) focus on the identification of browser users and utilization across multiple application deployments. Enjoy.