From: Mixmaster <mixmaster@remail.obscura.com>
Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 18:45:01 -0700 (PDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: No Subject
Message-ID: <199805140121.SAA02562@sirius.infonex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


[cons0005@algnet.algonquinc.on.ca wrote:]

I was wondering if anyone knows of such a creature that I could send 
email to with an URL, and I would get a reply of that HTML file?
example I email   bot@somewhere.com with the 
Subject:http://www.hotmail.com

and I will get an email of the HTML file at www.hotmail.com
This would be handy because I don't have a broswer (2 meg RAM (I 
know)) and also for anonymity, cookies etc I couldn't be traced.

-----

Actually you can do that really very easily. If you are interested in 
such Bot's. I really recommend you get O'Reilly's book: Web Client 
Programming, with Perl. It discusses to a large degree what your wanting 
to do. It has full source code as well, so you can take that and just 
fiddle with a bit until it suits your needs. Provided you or someone you 
know can program in Perl. 

I think one method you could do is to just use a majordomo server and 
tinker with it to suit the reception needs. Or you could on your own 
box, or a friends box. Make an account to the name you want, set up a 
resident program, with nohup or a simple cron job. Or do some script, 
that would serve equally as well. That could handle the reception 
facilities well enough. Then just use the modified bot to handle the 
HTML queries and sending and there you go. 

Although sending things back to the HTTP server in question might... 
interesting. If that place GET and POST methods for CGI scripts and 
dynamic pages, that raises some questions. Particularly, if the bot 
sends you the HTML doc that it requested, you view the page, yadda yadda 
yadda. It depends on how you want to work it and do it, you have to ask 
yourself. Do I want to send my request (whatever that maybe)from my 
machine? The request would go through. But it would be through your 
machine, and that would invalidate your anonymity. So thats a Bad 
Thing(tm) and out of the question. Or in cases like yours, the user 
might not have a browser. So that leaves it to us sending our request 
back to our automated little daemon and it does it for us. It would 
require just a little bit of handling and work to do the GET and POST 
methods for the CGI program your interacting with, but that would be 
minimal I think. I could be wrong however. In effect your using the bot 
as a kind of proxy for HTTP requests. 

If your really, REALLY desperate I might be able to quickly just put 
something together for you and post it here for you(or if another 
cypherpunk thats into Perl wants to do it, or if anyone else has any 
ideas). But you should be able to modify the code to suit whatever you 
want it to do. I've been experimenting with something similar, only on a 
slightly different note. If your patient, you can just subscribe to a 
majordomo "admin-help" list. Where the details of running such a thing 
are discussed by people that do. I'm sure one quite possibly exists 
somewhere. Then log on to a Bot mailing list and after hanging out on 
both for a while, asking a few questions perhaps you should be able to 
put something together I expect.

Or as mgraffam@mhv.net suggests you could log into those machines and do 
it that way. Which gives me another idea, you could have the bot run 
lynx remotely and then pipe the output from that to the letter it would 
send you and visa versa. But that makes things more complicated as well 
too. I question the value of doing that as well, I think the overhead 
would be a bit much, as well as being a slight hassle. I think over all, 
the easiest thing to do would be to possibly follow mgraffam's 
suggestion and just do that. Those are my thoughts on things at least. I 
hope they help.

I think the security possibilities of such a bot could be useful and 
could make a interesting discussion perhaps. There was one thread 
earlier that was discussing one such robot. From a government location, 
that was keeping tabs on crypto related sources. Crawling from link to 
link, from behind a firewall etc, etc, etc. If theres any more news 
relating to that thread, thats been uncovered I'd be interested in 
hearing more on it. 



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