[Gendergap] study about gendered names and IRC

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* Ryan Kaldari wrote:
>I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study 
>that was conducted regarding IRC:
>http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf
>
>The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some 
>female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high 
>traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they 
>received. The bots themselves were completely silent.

It seems only some of the bots were silent. I could not find how they
determined there were humans on the other hand. If I ran spambots that
tried to lure people on malicious web sites or whatever, I would make
them pick out new users or users with unusual nicknames, as they would
otherwise be quickly discovered and probably only hit experienced users
who are not too likely to fall for this kind of thing. Also, a channel
like "#poker" sounds more like a nest for spambots. Similarily, my im-
pression is that the networks they used do not require anything special
to send private messages. In contrast, on Freenode these days you have
to authenticate to services which in turn requires registration which
in turn requires confirming an e-mail address, as I recall it anyway.
If you don't have that, spambots should not be a big surprise. In the
ten years I've hung out on freenode, I got maybe one or two messages
that might fall vaguely in any of the categories here, so this isn't
telling me much really.

Long before freenode, pretty much the first IRC channel I got on was by
invitation. My internet service provider was sending out incorrect bills
to users of a recently introduced service and I was looking for other
victims and was told several people in that channel had the same trouble
so I went there and chatted with folks in the channel. Turned out that
the vast majority of people there were lesbians. Don't recall attacks on
that network either, but that was in the 1990s before spam was a notable
problem.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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