What's with the BOTs

[ComfyBear]

Are we being spied on ???

I've come to notice that, from time to time, down on the bottom of the page where it shows who is currently logged in and online, that there's a BOT from Google and another from Yahoo logged in.

Does anybody know what gives?

[one shot scott]

Search engines that have "permission" to browse?? is my uneducated guess. They come to this site almost as much as I do

[Big John]

I've noticed it many times. Have no idea what is going on with them.
Would be nice to know though.

[ComfyBear]

Just for everyones' general information, here's what BOTs are used for.

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 questions 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, however it is now limited in the amount of instant messages that can be sent and received."


"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 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.
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 Roleplaying Games 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."

[GaryL]

Many thanks ComfyBear, very interesting reading it was, and as always I learned something from YOU!!

GaryL ....

[ComfyBear]

GaryL, it's been awhile, so it's great to see you posting again. Hope all's well with you my friend.

Take Care,
Lou

[GaryL]

Yup ComfyBear I take a peek at the forum when my energy level is up Hope all's well with you also my friend.

GaryL ....