The dangers of automation on the blockchain

If you look at my profile here right now you will see a ton of duplicated posts. Like, really, really spammy.

That's because I hooked up my account to an IFTTT automation.

When robots attack

You can find out more about IFTTT here but essentially the idea is you automate things and plumb different services together.

There are a growing number of apps you can work with, obviously social tools and home automation

For example you could hook up your, say, Instagram account, then when things happen, such as you post a new picture, you can get IFTTT to do things, like perhaps tweet the picture to Twitter.

I had used their WebHooks feature to ping my server when I posted which would then syndicate that post, but what happened instead was it went into an infinite loop.

It's very simple to notify IFTTT of an event that you wish to respond to, just ping in the format:

https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/*event_name*/with/key/*yourkey*

You could use Python Requests or even Wget/cURL.

It's bad enough when these things break in public, can you imagine if I had to pay ETH gas fees, or worse all of this was permanently etched into the blockchain?

At least on Hive we can delete and edit!

I am going to work on cleaning up this profile ...

using more automation ... wish me luck!