Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with bot

Is there an AIM-to-IRC bot?

Mwongozi — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:54:08 -0800

Can I talk to my IRC-using friends via AIM? Bitlbee is the exact opposite of what I'm looking for. I essentially want a bot that will sit on an IRC server, pretending to be me, and forward any private messages to my AIM client - also relaying back my responses.

I don't really care about channels, I just want to be able to MSG people.

Does this exist? My Google-fu is failing me.

What is the purpose of this livejournal bot?

anonymisc — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:18:18 -0800

What mischief is this LiveJournal bot up to? An unknown livejournal "user", zdvovl, friended me, so I looked at the profile, and it had friended some of my friends too. (It had a friends list of over 200, about 8 of which were friends of mine). In some cases, there was no-one in the world, besides me, who could possibly know both of those users, or social circles, and there were clusters of friendings that aligned with social circles, so zdvovl was clearly using my friendslist (and those of my friends) to find users to friend. (Likewise, zdvovl was happy to friend ancient clearly-abandoned web-detritus accounts that it found in my friendslist, and other stuff that is unusual for genuine users to do).

I did a google search, and found some recent friendings that zdvovl was no-longer friends with. It appeared that zdvovl was trawling the network of friendships - it would friend users, use their friends list to friend their friends, de-friend them, and thus move through the social web of friendships, maintaining it's friendslist total in the 200s, but quickly making (and recording?) a far far greater number of connections over time. Mapping out who knows who? Recording all public lj entries? I don't know.

True to form, a few days later, zdvovl de-friended my account, and it has moved beyond the circles of users that I know.
Quirk: It doesn't appear to de-friend users that have friended it.

Livejournal has procedures for legitimate search-engine bots to follow, so I assume this is something illegitimate. (The name itself sounds generated - are there more of these bot-users?)

Does anyone know anything about this? Anything similar? What is the likely purpose of this bot? I can come up with a lot of speculative ideas, many of which would be an unwelcome use of Livejournal.

How to test a chat bot?

marble — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:08:12 -0800

How would you know a decent chat bot if you found one? I'm wondering what kinds of tricks you would use to figure out it's a bot, and to figure out how (un)sophisticated it was. I recently decided to play around with Perl again, and managed to cobble together a simple irc bot skeleton that I downloaded and somehow got to work. I might try to code up something rudimentary to amuse my daughter or something. I was looking at threads like this one and trying to get an idea of what would be impressive feats, for a chat bot.

I have some ideas myself, such as:

- teaching the bot something then asking about it later
- asking things about its personal history, family, whatnot
- asking it simple math problems

This is just a simple little project I'm playing with that probably won't go anywhere, but I find it intriguing to think about how I would go about trying to solve some of these problems, if I lacked my crippling laziness.

So, how would you probe a bot? What would be the dead giveaways, and what would give you pause / impress you if you saw the bot could handle it?

Computer virus that scanners aren't picking up?

kg — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:38:48 -0800

I'm using Outlook 2007. It keeps trying to send spam emails! When I start it says that it has 980 messages to send, and once it's done one it'll say it's sent 1 of 981 etc and so on (this happens when I have it offline and let it run for a bit). I've run a few virus scanners and they've all come back saying it's clean. What's even more annoying is that my other computer has also started doing this. I've run AVG, ClamWin (from a live CD), Trend Micro Housecall, Malware Bytes, Adaware and Spybot. At the most a few cookies are found.
All the Microsoft updates are installed.
I'm running COMODO firewall and AVG free all the time.

All the emails start the subject with "Not Read:" but the rest of the line varies. All seem to be about viagra type products.

In both cases the default account in outlook was used, and none of the others. The emails don't show up in the outbox.

Looking a HiJackThis log doesn't show anything unusual, but if someone else wants a look I can post that too.

Thanks for your help!

Help creating a bot

chips ahoy — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:57:03 -0800

I need help creating a web bot (for non-malicious purposes). Are there any tools out there to facilitate this? I need to retrieve some datasets from a web server. To get the datasets, it involves making a form request, getting assigned a random job number, waiting for the job number to finish (usually 5-15 minutes), and then downloading the datasets from the links presented on the job webpage (i.e. http://www.blah.com/jobs/[jobnumber]).

The access to this server is unlimited (a public government server) and not against its usage policy and my planned usage is very light, so let's skip that issue. The problem is that the interface is clumsy and it will be very tedious to sit there and submit each job for the data I need. I want to automate this and let the computer worry about it. Is there a good scripting language that can help me with this? I guess Perl is the obvious solution but I am not very well versed in it and I've seen very little in the way of short, elegant Perl code.

I'm very good with DOS scripts and Delphi (which I will probably resort to if there's no simple method).

Ask METARfilter: text weather to twitter?

edwardvielmetti — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:59:23 -0800

I'm looking for sources of weather data (current conditions, forecasts) that are in text formats so that I can turn them into a Twitter weather bot. What I have in mind is either existing ASCII products (METAR, AVN MOS) or derivatives of image products that (e.g. a compact text encoding of a radar map through some kind of image analysis). Ideas welcomed. The current weather bot is http://twitter.com/a2weather - it's only partially a bot since I have some stuff that I log to it by hand or from scripts.

Some things that have been useful are Twitterfeed (RSS to Twitter, scheduled every so often) and a simple shell script for posting to Twitter via curl.

The radar piece is what I think would be the coolest - I suspect that throwing Imagemagick at a radar GIF and then counting pixels on a county by county basis would do most of the trick.

Build a web bot?

benjh — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 04:27:09 -0800

Can I build/run a web bot? My company uses an outside vendor to do some web crawling for us, and they return the results to us, which we use as part of our workflow. They look for keywords, and if the page shows up with the keywords, then it appears in our results daily.

More and more, they aren't doing a very good job. So I'd like to get away from them, and possibly do our own in-house web bot.

Any suggestions on where to begin, or prepackaged options that might help?

Webbot

benjh — Mon, 09 May 2005 08:11:48 -0800

I need my own web bot. I need an application that will go to a set of web sites that I specify, grab information based on either (1) whether there are changes to the site, or (2) by keyword search.

Would prefer something client based. I've Googled, I've donwload.com'd, but I can't find anything that does what I want it to do.

Bot Blocking

brownpau — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 13:25:40 -0800

The rather rude Popdex bot has been bugging my referrer log every 5-10 minutes. I wish to block it via a "deny from" in my .htaccess, but the source address, http://h69-10-144-111.n-01.net, fails to resolve to an IP. How do I block this rather obnoxious crawler?