[![botshumans.jpg](https://s29.postimg.org/6osfqmhk7/botshumans.jpg)](https://postimg.org/image/tq90wdh7n/)
image source: @stellabelle 

# You may be surprised to learn that humans are no longer the dominant visitors to websites. 

Bots have again overtaken humans on the internet. While bots have outnumbered humans on the web many times before in years past, humans were more dominant on the internet in 2015. In 2016, bot activity again surpassed that of humans. But looking back over the last few years, 2013 saw a huge amount of bot activity, with 61.5%, compared with 38.5% human activity. It is actually much more balanced now than in 2013.

In 2016 bots were responsible for 52% of internet traffic while humans accounted for 48%. A new study carried out by [Imperva](https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2016.html) looked at 16.7 billion visits to 100,000 different domains to come up with their numbers.


[![bot-traffic-report-1.jpg](https://s28.postimg.org/ai358v0nh/bot_traffic_report_1.jpg)](https://postimg.org/image/9fsyqbhu1/) - Source: [Imperva](https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2016.html)

The study also divided up good bots from bad bots. Which kind of bots do you think there are more of? 

# Bad bots!

Bad bots make up 29% of all bots while good bots are at 23%. So, let’s now take a look at what the study defined as good and bad bots.

### Bad bots:  
Impersonators, scrapers, spammers and hacker tools.
### Good bots: 
Commercial crawlers, search engines, monitoring bots and feed fetchers.

There are varying definitions of good bots and bad bots depending on whose perspective is consulted. For this article, the data is taken from the Incapsula study which was released in late January, 2017. Obviously, in the hacking category, there are white hats and black hats. I would guess this study lumps both kinds of hackers together into the bad bots category.

With regard to bad bots, remember when half the internet was taken down in 2016? The bot responsible for that attack is called MIRAI. What is MIRAI you might ask?

<center>[![cyber-security-1923446_1280.png](https://s27.postimg.org/72egu97pf/cyber_security_1923446_1280.png)](https://postimg.org/image/d3c5rbubj/)</center>

> “Mirai (Japanese for "the future") is malware that turns computer systems running Linux into remotely controlled "bots", that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as remote cameras and home routers.[1] The Mirai botnet has been used in some of the largest and most disruptive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, including an attack on 20 September 2016 on computer security journalist Brian Krebs's web site, an attack on French web host OVH and the October 2016 Dyn cyberattack.[4][5][6] According to a leaked chat log between Anna-senpai and Robert Coelho, Mirai was named after the 2011 TV anime Mirai Nikki. - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(malware))

# What does it mean that there are more bad bots than good bots in existence? 

Are some of the bad bots actually good ones? Did the study lump the activities of Anonymous into the bad bot category? I don't know, but I did get a weird feeling in my stomach when I learned that there are more bad bots than good ones currently in existence. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around?

## Speaking of bots, I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently, especially since the @asshole account self-destructed and the immediate birth of several others, including @blacklist. 

[![robots-764951_1280.png](https://s27.postimg.org/l5h149emr/robots_764951_1280.png)](https://postimg.org/image/rj647ijin/)
Source: Pixabay

Many newbies to Steemit are immediately either surprised of shocked by the amount of automation and bot activity on the platform. When we see the data from reports like the Imperva one, I can’t help but think that Steemit is actually representative of the current state of technology and the internet. The big mainstream social media sites almost seem like human cocoon worlds, mostly insulated from the constantly evolving world of bots. Well, the bots are there, but we cannot see their activities really. Many Steemit users have adapted to the presence of bots, but many still are in disagreement about their ethics. 

### With the arrival of the @blacklist bot that [@schattenjaeger brought to our attention](https://steemit.com/blacklist/@schattenjaeger/you-re-not-getting-my-money-blacklist-other-users-should-refuse-too) yesterday, we are having to decide what is acceptable and what is not with regard to a bot’s ethics. 

What I find unappealing in bots like @blacklist is that the owner has not yet come forward to disclose very important details about the functionality of the bot. Without a human operator explaining why the bot was created and how it will operate, we are left feeling a bit rattled or confused by its existence. There are a lot of advantages to being transparent. Without transparency, humans will naturally assume all kinds of things, most of which will be manufactured in our imaginations. The fuel of confusion is emotion which leads to ideas based on our imaginations. Without clear facts, we have confusion.

# So, with that, I will say, will the real @blacklist please stand up and explain more about itself?

https://youtu.be/eJO5HU_7_1w