Book Idea: Building a Twitter Botnet using Elixir - anyone interested in reading such a book?

It’s definitely something new and inspiring. Go fo it!

It sounds interesting and fun idea. With regard to writing a book, you may want to think about widening the scope. So could your book cover cooperating bots and the notion of agency more generally? One reason for encouraging you is that Elixir/Erlang/OTP ecosystem provides an excellent foundation for this kind of work (happy to discuss that further and support the argument).

Yeah, I would implement some functionality like “let 40% of my bots retweet this tweet” and many other things. There are a ton of things you can do. Beside the botnet features itself, one could build a whole web control panel where you can control each bot individually etc.

Another big topic is obscurity. There are researchers out there who analyse social networks and try to find bots and botnets. And on the other side, there is Twitter who tries to identify bot accounts.
And there are some ways to make these things harder.

With regards to it being a book it should definitely be self-published because IMO no publisher will agree to sign their name under such a topic with a potential for service abuse.

I would prefer such a material to be slightly skewed towards a more general solution, namely how can a fleet of bots be managed efficiently and with minimal effort while it provides certain benefits out of the box? Example: not hitting API limits, as you pointed out. Or even having some of the bots do more requests (but still not hit limits) because they are in a faster network compared to another part of the group – so I mean a distributed code that can dynamically readjust where it runs more work depending on conditions like network speed, CPU speed, available memory. Almost like a true AI.

IMO most Twitter botnets are used to game the advertising and marketing game which is immoral but I will admit I am not very much into marketing anyway so my point of view might not be objective.

I would definitely go with Leanpub.com, the best platform for self publisher.

Functionality wise, I will focus on Twitter, BUT all of it can be used for other things too. The concepts are pretty much the same, just different API calls and slightly different behavior for other platforms.

The real interesting part is everything around. A botnet is fine, but it shouldn’t look like one.

Yeah, there are many single bot accounts who just tweet links to random pages where the victim is supposed to get spammed by advertisement. And of course, the normal “retweet” bots.

So may I ask why you opted for Twitter? You want to be sure the botnet is not caught and thus your algorithms to conceal the fact that it’s a net are successful and correct?

Twitter is the easiest I guess and it’s the social network I use the most. I don’t use Facebook or Google+ anymore. And Instagram is going to remove their API.

Well, I would read it. Curious how would you recommend running it from a multitude of IP addresses especially if you target hobbyist programmers (proxy services that can utilize millions of IPs aren’t very cheap).

Truthfully, computing as a whole – not only in BEAM VM land – desperately needs the next step in bulletproof distributed consensus and self-adjusting / adaptive fleets of machines. It really is about time some of us to actually move this forward. It’s complex, yes, but the IT world needs it badly, with all the Kubernetes and Docker hype and everybody wanting to have a nuclear-strike-resistant app infrastructure.

Have to look at it myself. But this only becomes important once you reach a certain size.

I have not yet found out my preferred way for distributed Elixir. I am waiting for firenest to become some sort of stable/usable.

I have setup the book on Leanpub already to collect some feedback if people are interested.

https://leanpub.com/twitter-botnet-elixir

(Yes, I need to add some info text there, I am lazy, don’t judge me :P)