I recently happened across a virtual vending machine for this little joy, the Insult Bot, and thought I’d share it. Reminds me of one of my previous posts on the future of virtual annoyances (Link). It also puts recent news about covert “stealth bots” crawling the net into a different perspective (see Wired article about that Here). Here’s a clip:

Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. “Basically this nullifies any traditional form of forensics,” says Hoffman.

So the Insult Bot might look primitive now, but just wait til the Japanese get hold of it – they’ll turn it into something with the shape of a Miss Universe and the mouth of a… well, you know.