This week, following up on the Ashley Madison fallout, and what Google’s new logo tells us about the company.

Ashley Madison update: More bots than we expected

So Avid Life Media, the company behind Ashley Madison, has refuted the analysis of Gizmodo journalist Annalee Newitz.

It seems that Newitz misinterpreted the data released by hacker group Impact Team. It turns out that there was no way for her to know how many of the 5.5 million accounts created for female users were actually created by real people.

A second release of information, more carefully analyzed by Newitz, tells a different story.

“What I have learned from examining the site’s the source code is that Ashley Madison’s army of fembots appears to have been a sophisticated, deliberate, and lucrative fraud,” writes Newitz. “The code tells the story of a company trying to weave the illusion that women on the site were plentiful and eager. Whatever the total number of real, active female Ashley Madison users is, the company was clearly on a desperate quest to design legions of fake women to interact with the men on the site.”

It seems that some 70,000 bots – automated conversation systems – were created to communicate with male users, encouraging them to spend money on services.

“Ashley Madison aspired to be a global network of people breaking the bonds of monogamy in the name of YOLO. Instead, it was mostly a collection straight men talking to extremely busy bots who bombarded them with messages asking for money,” Newitz writes.

It’s damn comical, is what it is.

And it’s looking ever more likely that the company, despite claiming the contrary, may have to shut down. Which, funny enough, is what the hackers wanted in the first place.

Google’s new logo drops links to the past

September 1 was a big day for Google. The company unveiled a new logo. An animated logo.

The new, moving logo is based on four coloured dots, which swirl into a multi-coloured “G”, splash into the company’s wordmark, and dance around playfully. If you’re using voice commands, the four dots stretch into lines that show you the system is listening to you.

The new font, Product Sans, was custom created for Google, and is also used for the wordmark of parent company, Alphabet. There’s a great article by Google designers Alex Cook, Jonathan Jarvis, and Jonathan Lee, explaining what went into the new logo.

What I like about this new logo is that it’s purpose built for screens. Static logos are a vestige of the print era. It’s only a matter of time before we all have giphy business cards.