Spambot is an organism that can only survive if fed from other bots. When it receives spam, it feeds from it and survives, but when it goes a little while without attention from it’s internet brothers, it grows weak and might die.
With this project, I am using something that not a lot of people are very fond of: Spam. We are growing weary of those internet entities that fill our email boxes with poetic messages about nigerian wealth and cheap viagra. After all, spam is useless, and can be the “Cheval de Troi” that puts us in a lot of trouble. But what if bots were used for good? What if they could affect our physical world in a peaceful and pleasant way?
Spambot is somewhat of a satire of this gardening trend going around on the internet of late. People have been using physical computing methods to take care of plants or animals. I think the idea of feeding a plant via Twitter is as ridiculous as feeding a robot via spam.
How it works
The first part of this project was to create a clever trap for spam. Therefore, I created a simple webpage with a form to fool the bots at http://www.iheartpigeons.com/projects/spambot/manage.php where they can do their thing. Before inserting the submitted form to a database, it is first parsed to see whether or not it originates from a bot. This was made by querying the message string for links, as bots really like links, and returning a true or false statement.
Making my trap a cozy bot nest wasn’t that easy. I had to submit the webpage to multiple directories which was long and boring, but all worth the effort.
(more information to come)