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AIM Bots: Useful or Spam?
An anonymous reader writes "Imagine my surprise this morning when AOL AIM popped up a window and introduced me to two bots that it automatically added to my buddy list. " Two seperate issues- one is simply auto adding robots to your friends list, which is very uncool. The second is a corporation using bots in an official capacity. This is an interesting trend, although technically speaking, not that far from the eggdrop of old.
Because your client is intelligent in thinking that maybe you logon to aim from somewhere else (perhaps work?) and that you might have added people there. So, being the smart program that it is, since AOL says that these people are in your buddy list it adds them.
This is far more a problem of aol screwing around with people's buddy lists and adding a group and 2 buddys to everyone's list.
AOL is letting me use their servers to connect to others to chat with. I'm using their resource for free, so yeah, I think they get a little more leeway than a spammer. Spammers tend to only use others resources. Spammers don't usually host email servers for the public for free. Totally different situation.