am I a spam-bot ?
-
scientific american reports on computer spam bots trolling chat rooms & forums !!! SCI-AM[^] Baffling the Bots Anti-spammers take on automatons posing as humans By Lee Bruno Three years ago rogue computer software programs called bots posed as teenagers in Yahoo's chat rooms on the Web. There they created mischief by collecting personal information about the teens who visited or by pointing chat participants to advertisements. After the bot incursion, Yahoo's technical staff realized that it needed to create a software gatekeeper that would allow human users in and keep automatons out. Udi Manber, Yahoo's chief scientist, went looking for help. He offered a challenge to Manuel Blum and his graduate students at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.