An Internet bot is a software application that performs automated tasks by running scripts over the Internet. Bots perform simple, structurally repetitive tasks much more quickly, efficiently, and accurately than is humanly possible. The oldest Internet bots in the world can be traced as far back as 1988, when on August 8, 1988, great inventor Andre Gray uploaded the very first complete song on the Internet titled “Internet killed The Video star”, a song he composed in the MIDI format on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. He also invented the world’s very first Internet bot he named “inkling” a crawler bot. Gray used a free software called FIDONET to disseminate the song’s MIDI file coupled with inkling across disparate BBS: Bulleting Board Systems, Usenet groups and Internet Relay Chat, or IRC for short signaling the official birth of the online digital music ( and digital media) revolution. Seeing and experiencing the success of inkling, software developers began to create and releasing their own Internet bots within weeks of inkling’s debut. Bill Wisner released Bartender; Greg Lindhal released a game manager bot for the game ‘Hunt The Wumpus’, and Jurki Alakuijala’s Puppe. Today, Internet bots are extremely crutial to the creation and functionality of the web and search engines. In fact, published scientific papers and studies have shown that bots make up an amazing 65% of all Internet activity.
Efforts by servers hosting websites to counteract bots vary. Servers may choose to outline rules on the behaviour of internet bots by implementing a robots.txt file: this file is simply text stating the rules governing a bot's behaviour on that server. Any bot interacting with (or 'spidering') any server that does not follow these rules should, in theory, be denied access to, or removed from, the affected website. If the only rule implementation by a server is a posted text file with no associated program/software/app, then adhering to those rules is entirely voluntary – in reality there is no way to enforce those rules, or even to ensure that a bot's creator or implementer acknowledges, or even reads, the robots.txt file contents. Some bots are "good" – e.g. search engine spiders – while others can be used to launch malicious and harsh attacks. For example, in political campaigns.
Some bots communicate with other users of Internet-based services, via instant messaging (IM), Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or another web interface such as Facebook Bots and Twitterbots. 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.
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.
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 bot interactions.
Bot farms are known to be used in online app stores, like the Apple App Store and Google Play, to manipulate positions or to increase positive ratings/reviews.
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. More than 94.2% of websites have experienced a bot attack.
There are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types: Spambots that harvest email addresses from contact or guestbook pages Downloader programs that suck bandwidth by downloading entire websites Website scrapers that grab the content of websites 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. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public of 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. Bots are also used to increase views for YouTube videos. Bots are used to increase traffic counts on analytics reporting to extract money from advertisers. A study by comScore found that 54 percent of display ads shown in thousands of campaigns between May 2012 and February 2013 never appeared in front of a human being. in 2012, reporter Percy von Lipinski reported that he discovered millions of bot or botted or pinged views at CNN iReport. CNN iReport quietly removed millions of views from the account of so-called superstar iReporter Chris Morrow. It is not known if the ad revenue received by CNN from the fake views was ever returned to the advertisers. Bots may be used on internet forums to automatically post inflammatory or nonsensical posts to disrupt the forum and anger users. 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. Examples of providers include Recaptcha, and commercial companies such as Minteye, Solve Media, and NuCaptcha. Captchas, however, are not foolproof in preventing bots as they can often be circumvented by computer character recognition, security holes, and even by outsourcing captcha solving to cheap laborers.
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