Internet bots, also known as
web
robots,
WWW robots or simply
bots, are software applications that run automated
tasks over the
Internet. Typically, bots
perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at
a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The
largest use of bots is in
web spidering,
in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files
information from web servers at many times the speed of a human.
Each server can have a file called
robots.txt, containing
rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to
obey.
In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be
implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is
required (
e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or
less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity
is required, for example chat bots.
These
chatterbots may allow people to ask
in plain English and then formulate a proper response. These bots
can often handle many tasks, including reporting weather, zip-code
information, sports scores, converting currency or other units,
etc. Others are used for entertainment, such as
SmarterChild on
AOL Instant Messenger and
MSN Messenger and
Jabberwacky on
Yahoo! Messenger.
An additional role of
IRC bots may be to
lurk in the background of a conversation channel, commenting on
certain phrases uttered by the participants (based on
pattern matching). This is sometimes used
as a help service for new users, or for censorship of
profanity.
AOL Instant Messenger has now
introduced a feature that allows you to make a screen name into a
bot. This new feature removes the rate limit on the screen name,
but it is now limited in the amount of
instant messages that can be sent and
received.
Commercial purposes
There has been a great deal of controversy about the use of bots in
an automated trading function. Auction website
eBay has been to court in an attempt to suppress a
third-party company from using bots to traverse their site looking
for bargains; this approach backfired on eBay and attracted the
attention of further bots.
The United Kingdom
-based bet exchange
Betfair saw such a large amount of traffic
coming from bots they launched a WebService API aimed at bot
programmers through which Betfair can actively manage these
bots.
Charitable purposes
Bots have also been known to fast-track the purposes of charities,
one of which is
FreeRice.
On FreeRice
Since FreeRice became well-known through
Digg.com and other news sources, many
programming-adept users created scripts to automatically play the
game for them. The scripts operate far faster than humans alone and
run for 24 hours a day. At first, the scripts got only ≈1/4 of the
words correct by random chance. Eventually, these bots were adapted
with automated online dictionary search, dictionary files, and word
database dumps so the programs can
choose the correct answers the first time more often. The word
database dumps were created so when the incorrect answer was
chosen, the bots would record the correct answer the next page
would show. Thus, the bot would choose the correct answer whenever
it happened upon the same words later. Due to the growing number of
scripts used on FreeRice, the number of rice donated has remarkably
risen. Currently there are no rules governing "ricebots", as they
are called. Until those rules are formed, anyone is free to program
and use the scripts. With a delay of about 3 seconds between
iterations, it is estimated that a script can feed about 8 people
per day, if running 24/7. The idea was taken even further to create
a
multi-threaded bot which
can run fifty or more browser instances at a time, enough to
liberate as much as 600,000 grains of rice per hour or to feed 720
people per day. One script with 1,000 threads was able to donate
over 3,000,000 grains in just a few hours.
Donated rice comes from the advertisements from sponsors, therefore
abuse of scripts will likely lead to catastrophe, as advertisers
prefer that actual people view their advertisements. Knowing the
existence of the bots, FreeRice updated their
FAQ explaining the potential damage of botting. Some
bots have made changes to make sure they won't spoil the FreeRice
spirit.
Malicious purposes
Another, more malicious use of bots is the coordination and
operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a
denial-of-service attack by
a
botnet. Internet bots can also be used to
commit
click fraud and more recently
have seen usage around
MMORPG games as
computer game bots. A spambot is
an internet bot that attempts to
spam large amounts of content on the
Internet, usually adding advertising links.
- There are malicious bots (and botnets)
of the following types:
- Spambots that harvest
email addresses from internet
forums, contact forms or guestbook
pages
- Downloader programs that suck bandwidth by downloading entire
web sites
- Web site scrapers that grab the
content of web sites and re-use it without permission on
automatically generated doorway pages
- Viruses and worms
- DDoS
attacks
- Botnets / zombie computers; etc.
- File-name modifiers on peer-to-peer
file-sharing networks. These
change the names of files (often containing malware) to match user
search queries.
- Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts,
particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets. Bots are
employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites, like
TicketMaster.com. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly
obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general
public from also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot
runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by
pulling as many seats back as it can.
- Bots are often used in massively
multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) to farm for
resources that would otherwise take significant time or effort to
obtain; this is a concern for most online in-game economies.
The most widely used anti-bot technique is the use of
CAPTCHA, which is a form of
Turing test used to distinguish between a human
user and a less-sophisticated AI-powered bot, by the use of
graphically encoded human-readable text.
Bots in popular culture
- The Basshunter song "Boten Anna" makes many references to IRC Bots,
but confusingly also features the singer riding a boat. Which is a
little play on the Swedish language since Bot (Bot) and Boat (Båt)
in Swedish are pronounced similarly.
See also
References
External links
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