Ok, I presume everyone knows those bots roaming the instant messenger networks that operate under actual people their accounts based on the credentials obtained from an unsuspecting victim (read: clueless user who wants free shinies) typing said credentials where they shouldn't have. This is one such a tale I just experienced.

What makes me want to share this particular one is because it stood out to me personally in more ways than one. For one, my list of contacts is ancient, and I have contacts on there that I haven't spoken to in 10 years or more. This is one relatively old contact, the user being a girl (at the time?) who was never particularly bright. Hell, let me expand: she is an idiot. And like all of those people on that list that you really can't get rid of (because you are too lazy to clean up your eternally hidden 'offline contacts' list as well as 'old contacts' list), they message you once a year to tell you how epicly awesome their lives are while you are trying to figure out what the hell did I do to deserve this blabberage of non-sensiility?!.

0:45 Emma: Hey! You there?

That is how it started. I feigned afk-ness. I really had no interest in another case of the yearly mental slumps. Sadly, it was not to be.

2:33 Emma: Hi You there?

Ok. While this girl tends to crave attention, she usually is in a bit more of a hurry and spams me with non-stop messages till I reply rather than waiting nearly two hours. Either that, or she is bored. As I am in a particularly vindictive mood having realized that, regardless of her identity as a spambot or a person, I really don't want to deal with her insanity in my usual gentlemanly way, I launch a counter-offensive. The human captcha.

2:34 Me: Maybe. What do you want? (Also, finish this sequence: 1,1,2,3,5,8,...; I don't know who messaging me is or is not a spambot anymore.)

The catch? Emma the person is easily the sort of person who would fail something like this, thus providing me amusement in that particular case. The Fibonacci sequence always has been a personal favorite of mine, if only to weed out the idiots of life.

2:35 Emma: noo its me
2:35 Me: Finish the sequence. Prove you are human, evil spambot!

I still didn't actually know who or what I was talking to. Whichever is the case, it definitely does sound like the human variety.

2:35 Emma: Im on my new iPad 2 right now :) Its so cool
2:36 Me: Ok, that leans towards spambot. Tell me, where do I buy that wonderful device you are advertising?

Here is where I doubt myself. Is she messing with me? She never seemed like the type. But there was no link either. Hmm. Better safe than sorry, and continue down this lane of simple entertainment.

2:36 Emma: I think you can also get one if you hurry, its a limited promotion.. I got it from http://giftparadise235.com/?id=68549bfb409113fe

Finally, I can decide. Spambot!

2:37 Me: That's really awesome. I think.
2:38 Emma: Well, let me know if you need any help with it. I gotta leave for a bit though, so Ill talk to you later.
2:38 Me: Take care, Spambot Emma.

And it is confirmed by the immediate ending of the conversation to avoid seeming less human. Now - most of you will agree, it is a somewhat typical discussion with a typical im-spam-bot. But for me it stood out in several ways, the 'victim' Emma being an obvious first in that as one might guess by my commentary above.

What also entertained me on a scientific level is that this one had me going for so long that I truly thought I had found my match for the Turing test. Now, in hindsight I obviously should have picked some worse questions rather than to play along, but simply knowing a human can sound like such an idiot really lowers the bar for the creators of conversation bots like these.

But the cherry on the cake that I determined only after laughing and considering this whole exchange? The spam-link does not work. The domain is not registered, a.k.a. completely out of order... defect... BROKEN. :) Either it has been taken offline already, has yet to come online, or more hilariously, this bot has strayed from the farm of its peers that instructs it about its spam messages.

All of this only tempts one to wonder... How many loose unmanaged bots have to be out there at this point? How many spam messages out there have no chance of ever being successful even if a user/potential victim is fooled successfully? Did Emma ever actually get her iPad!?

This message was brought to you by the gentleman with the white hat. URL addresses and identification numbers have been anonimized for safety & security purposes. Any opinions are merely the opinions of the author that usually wears the white hat, but did not today as the hat was totally offended by the lack of appreciation and manners towards a (presumably) fine young lady. The white hat itself, obviously, is opinionless. Although it does demand you treat the other sex with the appropriate amount of respect, or it will clamp down on your head so hard that your brain will die off due to a lack of oxygen... beware!

Opera suffered from bad marketing and a bad approach to selling it. The fact the free version had builtin ads for most of its life meant people simply didn't try it; those were the worst of the worst days when adblockers were in their infancy, regularly windowbombed the crap out of your pc so that it crashed, and so forth. The fact it had builtin advertising simply meant people were like 'no damn way am I adding more ads to my browsing experience!' Add to that that they never had the free advertising of simply being a popular opensource package, and they were always the minor lone wolf fighting Internet Explorer after the demise of Netscape (ok, there was Seamonkey, but that sucked donkey balls). Eventually, Mozilla got its act together and released Firefox. Opera had its chance, but to be fair: there were no successful business models for free browser software. Internet Explorer ruined that market, and there was no Google to play sugar-contract-daddy either.

Software-wise, it is very difficult to add good features, especially given that users tend to request visual things. Windows in particular is a crazy layer of cogwheels that work together to make the interface work. To provide a seamless experience, you need to support Windows Classic (with custom colours!), Windows Themes (visual styles, XP style), and Windows Aero. Doing that consistently on W7 is a huge headache on its own, then add support for older versions like XP. (Or start out for XP, go to W7.. my point remains similar.) Then throw in stuff like DPI, multi monitor support and perhaps even an inhouse style/configuration your application has to conform to, and you've got a huge feature matrix of hell already. Some applications are like 'hey, let's recreate all controls in our own custom theme'... and then you end up with a really crappy experience as a user. This is one of the reasons I dislike WPF - recreates all standard Windows controls, and I plain notice the little differences between the real win32 control and the WPF faked varieties. It makes it easier to make special custom controls, but it just as easily makes it possible to design those things so that the feature matrix tests want to cry. Ask cranioscopical - it took me a fair number of builds/versions just to get DPI handling right in JottiQ. Or JoTo for the partially unsolved issue with his High Contrast themes. JottiQ is one big chain of bugfixes/workarounds/etc for merely visual issues, and that really is a hell most easily avoided by sticking to the standard controls without fancy colours, images and the sort. (And then your application looks boring, making for crap screenshots and no downloads. :D)