Evil business idea: serve ads to robots
People make money through advertising on the Net. When humans go to a server and ask for a response, the server has an opportunity to give them an ad as well as what they really wanted. In some edge-cases (like when the page that was asked for doesn’t exist) the server can give them an ad instead of what they really wanted. If the site doesn’t exist, a DNS service can play the same card. (Grrr.)
But it isn’t just humans who ask to be given content. Robots (autonomous running programs) are always hassling servers too. Unless they’re proxying for humans who are going to read the response later, we don’t currently tend to see this as an advertising opportunity.
Until we try to. For example, sometimes robots are the minions of evil. Computer crackers run programs to look around the Net for vulnerable servers that they can break into. Normally a good firewall says “go away”. What would happen if it served the robot an advert instead?
Of course, most robots can’t understand adverts. But the system could take something of a honeypot approach, and wrap the advert in a more carefully crafted response that the robots would think the human who owned them ought to look at. Gotcha!
This wacky idea is probably ultimately evil. If you want to get the best return from adverts, you have to tune them to your audience. Apart from stylish black hats, most of the products and services that evil crackers want probably make the world a worse place. Also the idea has an evil twin: delivering adverts to honest system administrators by wrapping them in faux interesting responses to whatever their good robots end up sending to you.
