User Guides What are Bots ,and an introdcution to the types of Bots.

bot - Short for robot, a computer program that runs automatically.- source​

Dont let the simple definition mislead you.If there is one under-rated area of application and research in our online lives,it is that of a bot.What you could say has resurfaaced off late as a useful feature of IRC servers and clients ,which allowed to script customand automatic responses to activites on the IRC channel.Nowadays we see bots from games,to messenger plugins,to virtual pets and personcal assistants ..so and so forth ,infact now there are a wide range of areas that have been slowly yet steadily beeing crept with man made bots.

spiders,wanderers, and worms. Cancelbots, Lazarus, Automoose. Chatterbots, softbots, userbots,taskbots, knowbots, mailbots. MrBot and MrsBot. Warbots, clonebots, floodbots, annoybots, hackbots, and Vladbots. Gaybots, gossipbots, gamebots. Skeleton bots, spybots, and sloth bots. Xbots, meta-bots.eggdrop bots - all just some of the various avtars imposed depending on the usage .

"The Web welcomes all bots. Chatterbots like Eliza and Julia have taken up residence on Web pages. IRCbots, frozen in suspended animation, are accessible in Web-based archives of code. Gamebots lurk, waiting to do battle, in online gaming networks interwoven with the Web. The Web, irresistibly connecting and binding together all the communities of cyberspace – MUDs and bulletin boards and chat rooms – is the reconvergent Pangaea, the mother continent where all bots someday will roam. "(Leonard, 1997, p.152).http://www.accesswave.ca/~hgunn/special/papers/bots/review.htmlhttp://www.accesswave.ca/~hgunn/special/papers/bots/review.html

Now Thers no point in contemplating as to when they're gonna take over the world,but heres some info that could really throw light onto the dark and often ignored world of bots.

 

[bosky101]

Search bots
- A "software spider" is an unmanned program operated by a search engine that surfs the Web just like you would. As it visits each Web site, it follows (or "crawl") hyperlinks to the depths of a website, reading, and adding each page location into their database / hdd for searching purposes,all the words on each site and notes each link to other sites. It then "clicks" on a link, and off it goes to read, index and store another Web site.
-Check out the types of search bots here.

Chat bots
Alice
ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is a natural language interface to a telerobotic eye.Also in the news : "Supermodel Bot Sells Auto" .Chat with a version ..uhmm i mean a friend of Alice.

Billy,Cotiro,GUSH,and Daisy are also worth checking out,made by a college student named Greg Leedberg.

Gaming Bots
While Counter strike and other first person shooters are more familiar with the idea of bots(damn theyre gud !),there are more areas of interest ,ladies and gentlemen.I personaly find the following worth mentioning:

Roboforgehttp://www.roboforge.net
Roboforge lets you construct gigantic robotic gladiators, train them to think and fight, and then unleash them in massive international tournaments for money and prizes.

AI Wars (The Insect Mind)
A.I. Wars (The Insect Mind) allows you to develop the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) of an insect-like mechanized unit. Once you have developed your A.I. to the point that you think it can hold its own in battle you can then plop it into a battle simulation and see if it can survive! It's your unit against up to 500 others! Remember: "Smart bugs never die!" & "May your A.I. Bugs be without A.I. bugs!"

Personal Bots
1.Pandora Bots

Pandorabots is the place where you can create and unleash virtual personalities. Pandorabots is an experimental software robot hosting service based on the work of Dr. Richard Wallace and the A.L.I.C.E./AIML free software community.

2.Talkymail

TalkyMail gives your mailbox a voice, so it can tell you how many emails you have and read them to you. You can get TalkyMail to read aloud your emails, web pages, documents, help files, clipboard content or just about any other text. TalkyMail supports 10 different languages.

3.SeeStorm Messenger

SeeStorm Messenger is an expressive and anonymous voice & video instant messenger with talking 3D characters. SeeStorm's mission is to redefine the way people communicate over the Internet by enhancing their online communication abilities and experience. You can make new connections and still maintain your anonymity by using 3D characters instead of showing your real face.

4.Gaim messenger 's buddy pounce
This feature in Gaim,is an instance of a messenger bot where you can have auto messages for login,logoff,status,custom words in ur buddy's replies,and so on - which can activate a lot of stuff like custom messages,sounds,and even programs.

5.Tahnihttp://www.oska.com/tahni.pht?id=705310

Tahni is a sexy supermodel who lives and plays on your desktop. She reacts if you touch her or move her around the screen with your mouse. If you leave her alone, she will amuse herself and entertain you in the process.

6.Talking Translator Pro

Talking Translator Pro is a small and easy to use 4 in 1 language utility which can translate text between 7 languages. Find meanings of words. Read the contents of files and clipboard. Edit and saves your translation and meanings. It also comes with in-built Text to Speech feature. Text to Speech engines in about 12 languages are provided free.

7.Make your own PotatoBOT

Bots are built from familiar pop-culture components and in just three easy steps you can build and distribute your own ©Bot online without any manufacturing infrastructure, high-priced union labor, or ugly sweatshops.

Tracking Bots
Features bots that can be classified into

-E-mail Notification Bots
-News Bots
-Spam Filtering Bots
-Spy Bots
-Weather Bots
-Web Monitoring Bots
-Image bots
and so on

Search Bots
Features bots that can be classified into

-Image Bots
-Metasearch Bots
-Music Bots
-Newsgroup Bots
-On-line investigation

Malware Bots
These are directed at the black hats and security specialists, to mention the latest in security concerns and powers provided by malware bots and botnets.

1.Agobot/Phatbot/Forbot/XtremBot
This is probably the best known bot. Currently, the AV vendor Sophos lists more than 500 known different versions of Agobot (Sophos virus analyses) and this number is steadily increasing. Agobot uses libpcap (a packet sniffing library) and Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) to sniff and sort traffic.

2.SDBot/RBot/UrBot/UrXBot/...
This family of malware is at the moment the most active one,currently seven derivatives on the "Latest 10 virus alerts".

3.mIRC-based Bots - GT-Bots
These bots launch an instance of the mIRC chat-client with a set of scripts and other binaries.

4.DSNX Bots
The Dataspy Network X (DSNX) bot is written in C++ and has a convenient plugin interface. An attacker can easily write scanners and spreaders as plugins and extend the bot's features.

5.Q8 Bots
Q8bot is a very small bot, consisting of only 926 lines of C-code. And it has one additional noteworthiness: It's written for Unix/Linux systems. It implements all common features of a bot: Dynamic updating via HTTP-downloads, various DDoS-attacks (e.g. SYN-flood and UDP-flood), execution of arbitrary commands, and many more.

6.kaiten
The bot itself consists of just one file. Thus it is very easy to fetch the source code using wget, and compile it on a vulnerable box using a script.

7.-Perl-based bots
There are many different version of very simple based on the programming language Perl. These bots are very small and contain in most cases only a few hundred lines of code and are used on Unix-based systems. source - Know your Enemy:
Tracking Botnets - Using honeynets to learn more about Bots

 

[bosky101]

1.Swarm-bots
Swarm-bots is a project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community (IST-2000-31010), aimed to study new approaches to the design and implementation of self-organizing and self-assembling artifacts.

2.AI Depot - Bot ,AI tutorials

3.AI Toolkithttp://www.openchannelsoftware.com/projects/AI_Toolkit
For the bot developer within you.hard core stuff here.

4.IBM Tests Distributed AI with Quake 2http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/22/0351229
eWeek has a report that IBM has been testing its grid-computing system. What better than a distributed AI to stress the grid? The University of Wisconsin developed GameGrid derived from IBM's OptimalGrid and id Software's Quake 2. The article reports that about 80 bots were playing within the game.

5.Essays: how to build your own bots
Regarding all sort of web robots:Basically, though, the idea is to allow you to learn enough to WRITE your own search bots in Perl .

6.Googlebot: Google's Web Crawler
Googlebot is Google's web-crawling robot. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. On this page, you'll find answers to the most commonly asked questions about how our web crawler works.

 

[bosky101]

And now a small footnote that 'll probably inspire atleast some of us ,to venture and explore the interesting world of bots.

"Evolution just happens – it isn’t headed anywhere, except onward. The theory of natural selection explains only how organisms through time to change to local environments. It does not mandate that those organisms become smarter or stronger or faster or lovelier. It just demands that they survive. (Leonard, 1997, p. 236).

 

[XTerminator]

Nice work there Bosky,
Interesting Read.

Thread Rated.

 

[Apex]

nice guide bosky..
keep it up

 

[~HeadShot~]

Kewl man!
Thread rated...