Four Robot Recognitions
William Moor

     

1. This invention allows a system to prevent robots from browsing a site beyond a welcome page. When an initial request from an undefined originator is received site responds to it with a welcome page including at least one trap. Then, on receiving further requests from the undefined originator site can check whether a trap is used or not. If not used the undefined originator is assumed to be a human being and is authorized to go on. If a trap is however used the undefined originator is assumed to be a robot in which case site access is further denied. This invention prevents site contents from being investigated by robots while not requiring users to have to log on.

1. A method for preventing robots from browsing a site beyond a welcome page, said method in said site comprising the steps of:

on receiving an initial request from an undefined originator to establish a session:

responding to said initial request with a said welcome page including at least one trap;

dynamically monitoring action by the undefined originator on said at least one trap during said session;

on receiving further requests from said undefined originator during said session:

checking whether one of said at least one trap is used or not;
if not used:

assuming that said undefined originator is a human being and keep processing said further requests; and

if used:

assuming that said undefined originator is a robot and stopping processing of said further requests.

 

2. The method according to claim 1 further including the steps of:

logging a source address of said undefined originator and starting a timer.

 

3. The method according to claim 2 further including, whenever receiving a new request, the steps of:

checking whether a source address of said new request is matching said logged source address; and

if matching:

checking whether said timer has expired or not; and

if expired:

resetting said logged address; and

proceeding normally with said new request;

if not expired:

performing one of dropping and redirecting said
if not matching:

proceeding normally with said new request; and

repeating said steps with every new received request.

 

4. The method according to claim 1 wherein said step of stopping processing said further requests includes performing one of dropping and redirecting a connection established with said undefined originator.

 

5. The method according to claim 1 wherein said trap is an anchor invisible when displayed.

 

6. The method according to claim 5 wherein said anchor includes an invisible image.

 

7. The method according to claim 1 wherein every page out of said Web site includes at least one trap.

 

8. A system for a site to implement at least one trap in a page for preventing robots from browsing a site beyond a welcome page, comprising:

a processor comprising a response component, a trap checking component and processing component;

response component for, on receiving an initial request from an undefined originator to establish a session, responding to said initial request with a welcome page including at least one trap;

trap checking component for, dynamically monitoring action by the undefined originator on said at least one trap during said session, and on receiving further requests from said undefined originator in the same session, checking whether one of said at least one trap is used or not;

processing component for, if said at least one trap is not used, processing said further requests; and if said at least one trap is used, stopping processing of said further requests.

 

9. The system of claim 8 further comprising logging means for logging a source address of said undefined originator and starting a timer.

 

10. The system of claim 9 wherein said stopping processing by said processing component comprises:

performing one of dropping and redirecting a connection established with said undefined originator.

 

11. The system according to claim 8 further including means for checking whether a source address of said new request is matching said logged source address; and

if matching:

checking whether said timer has expired or not; and

if expired:

resetting said address; and

proceeding normally with said new request;

if not expired:

performing one of dropping and redirecting said connection; and

if not matching:

proceeding normally with said new request; and

repeating said steps with every new received request.

 

12. A computer like readable medium comprising instructions for carrying out a method for preventing robots from browsing a site beyond a welcome page, said method in said site comprising the steps of:

on receiving an initial request from an undefined originator to establish a session:

responding to said initial request with a welcome page including at least one trap;

monitoring action by the undefined originator on said at least one trap during said session;

on receiving further requests from said undefined originator in the same session:

checking whether one of said at least one trap is used or not;
if not used:

assuming that said undefined originator is a human being and keep processing said further requests; and

if used:

assuming that said undefined originator is a robot and stopping processing of said further requests.

Robots, also called Wanderers, Crawlers or Spiders and often just referred to as bots (bot is short for robot), are programs devised to automatically traverse the hypertext structure thus, having retrieved a document, can recursively retrieved all the linked pages. Especially, this is the case of the numerous engines and their robots which roam the World finding and indexing content to add to their databases. Although most robots provide a valuable service this has developed a certain amount of concern amongst administrators about exactly how much of their precious time is being used to service requests from these engines. If the majority of robots are well designed, are professionally operated and cause no problems, there are occasions where robots visiting are not welcome. Sometimes because of the way robots behave. Some may or retrieve repeatedly. If done intentionally this is a form of attack although this is more often just the result of a poor or defective robot design. In other situations robots traverse parts of that are not suitable for being searched e.g., contain duplicated or temporary information, include large documents. In this latter case and in similar situations, when accessed and executed, scripts tend to consume significant resources in generating dynamic pages thus, slow down the system. In recognition of these problems many robots offer facilities for site and content providers to limit what the robot is allowed to do. Two mechanisms are provided. One is referred to as the "Robots Exclusion Protocol" even though it is not really an enforced protocol but was a working document discussed as a "Method for Robots Control." According to this document a site can indicate which parts of the site should not be visited by a robot, by providing a specialty. The other mechanism assumes that an author can indicate if a page may or may not be indexed, or analyzed for links, through the use of a special language i.e., a "Robots tag." However, these mechanisms rely on cooperation from the robots, and are not even guaranteed to work for every robot. Moreover, as already suggested here above, some of these robots may not be so friendly. They could be run e.g., with the malicious intent of attacking a site (then, they just ignore the robots file and the robots tags) so as it becomes overloaded and start refusing to serve legitimate users i.e., the human beings trying to use normally the site. Also, although the information made available on a site may not be confidential, an administrator may want to prevent an unlimited dissemination of it that would otherwise result of its indexing and referencing by all sorts of robots.

The standard way of achieving this is to protect a site through some form of authentication of which the more common method is to manage a list of users signing on upon accessing the site. The obvious drawback of this is that administrators must manage and update a closed list of users thus, requiring a registration step for a first consultation of a site also, assuming that users remember passwords in subsequent consultations. This may not be at all what administrator wanted to achieve in a first place and may even be counterproductive since it will certainly discouraged some individuals, willing to browse, to go further if they are required.

Thus, it is a broad object of the invention to prevent site contents from being investigated by robots.

It is a further object of the invention of not discouraging human beings, attempting to access a robot protected site, to proceed by imposing a registration at first access and procedure at each subsequent access.

It is still another object of the invention not to rely on robots cooperation for barring them access to contents of sites.

Further objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the following description in reference to the accompanying drawings. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.

A method and a system for preventing robots from browsing a site beyond a welcome page are described. On receiving an initial request from an undefined originator site responds to it with a welcome page including at least one trap. Then, on receiving further requests from the undefined originator site can check whether a trap is used or not. If not used the undefined originator is assumed to be a human being and site keeps processing all its further requests. However, if a trap is used the undefined originator is assumed to be a robot in which case all requests from that originator are not further processed.

The invention prevents site contents from being investigated by robots without requiring end users to have to manage an access list of authorized users.

2.

A monitoring device and method, of a vacuum-system device having a vacuum portion, which can collectively perform the maintenance control of the device or counter measures to overcome drawbacks by providing a monitoring method equivalent to monitoring in real time and simultaneously based on data from respective types of sensors of the vacuum system. By visualizing the state of a driving system in a vacuum, a vacuum valve, a vacuum state and a state of an electro-optic system on a screen, the device state in a vacuum may be grasped. Further, it is possible to perform the time measuring and the comparison of data with the reference data by setting up timing charts with respect to the ON/OFF timing of various sensors, Open/Close timing and vacuum state. Judgment can be made at the time of performing the device maintenance operation and the device repairing operation.

1. A monitoring device of a vacuum device having a vacuum system comprising:

a screen display device;

a screen display processing device which receives operation information signals from the vacuum system as input data and performs screen display processing so as to make the screen display device perform a screen display;

and

a memory device which stores basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system; wherein

on a screen of the screen display device, the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts are displayed as timing charts which progress simultaneously in comparison,

and

a display which designates simultaneous time positions extending over the plurality of constituent parts of the vacuum system on the timing charts is presented.

2. A monitoring device of a vacuum device having a vacuum system comprising:

a screen display device;

a screen display processing device which receives operation information signals from the vacuum system as input data and performs screen display processing so as to make the screen display device perform a screen display;

and

a memory device which stores basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system;

wherein

on a screen of the screen display device, the plurality of constituent parts are displayed, and the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts are displayed as timing charts which progress simultaneously in comparison,

and

when simultaneous time positions are designated extending over the plurality of constituent parts of the vacuum system on the timing charts, operation states of the plurality of constituent parts which correspond to the simultaneous time positions are displayed together.

 

3. A monitoring device of a vacuum device having a vacuum system comprising:

a screen display device;

a screen display processing device which receives operation information signals from the vacuum system as input data and performs screen display processing so as to make the screen display device perform a screen display;

a memory device which stores basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system and a predetermined difference between the basic monitoring data and the operation history data;

and

a processing device which compares the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts as timing charts which progress simultaneously, and judges whether any one constituent part of the plurality of constituent parts exceeds the predetermined difference at the designated simultaneous time.

 

4. A monitoring device of a vacuum device having a vacuum system which produces a vacuum comprising:

a screen display device;

a screen display processing device which receives operation information signals from the vacuum system as input data and performs screen display processing so as to make the screen display device perform a screen display;

and

a memory device which stores basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system and a predetermined difference between the basic monitoring data and the operation history data;

and

a processing device which compares the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts as timing charts which progress simultaneously, and judges whether any one constituent part of the plurality of constituent parts exceeds the predetermined difference at the designated simultaneous time,

wherein

on a screen of the screen display device, the plurality of constituent parts are displayed, and the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts are displayed as timing charts which progress simultaneously in comparison, and

when simultaneous time positions are designated extending over the plurality of constituent parts of the vacuum system on the timing charts, operation states of the plurality of constituent parts which correspond to the simultaneous time positions are displayed together.

 

5. A monitoring device of a vacuum device according to any one of preceding 4, wherein the basic monitoring data is either pre-registered data or stored operation history data.

 

6. A monitoring method of a vacuum device having a vacuum system which produces a vacuum comprising the steps of:

unputting operation information signals from the vacuum system as data

performing display processing;

storing basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system;

displaying the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts on a screen in the screen display processing as timing charts which progress simultaneously in comparison;

and

displaying on the screen a display which designates simultaneous time positions extending over the plurality of constituent parts of the vacuum system on the timing charts.

 

7. A monitoring method of a vacuum device according to claim 6, wherein the method further includes a step in which the difference between the basic monitoring data and the operation history data is preliminarily determined and stored, and a step in which whether the plurality of constituent parts are within or outside the difference based on the timing charts is judged.

 

8. A monitoring method of a vacuum device which has a vacuum system producing a vacuum and is installed at a remote place comprising the steps of:

inputting operation information signals from the vacuum system of the vacuum device which is previously determined as data;

performing screen display processing;

storing basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system;

sequentially displaying, with respect to the vacuum device, the plurality of constituent parts on a screen of a screen display device;

displaying the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts as timing charts which progress simultaneously in comparison;

and

reporting operation states of the plurality of constituent parts which correspond to the simultaneous time positions, when simultaneous time positions are designated extending over the plurality of constituent parts of the vacuum system on the timing charts.

 

9. A monitoring method of a vacuum device which has a vacuum system producing a vacuum comprising the steps of:

inputting operation information signals from the vacuum system of the vacuum device which is previously determined as data through a communication network into a CPU;

performing screen display processing;

storing basic monitoring data and operation history data of a plurality of constituent parts which constitute the vacuum system in a hard disk;

sequentially displaying, with respect to the vacuum device, the plurality of constituent parts on a screen of a screen display device;

displaying the basic monitoring data and the operation history data of the plurality of constituent parts as timing charts which progress simultaneously in comparison; and

displaying operation states of the plurality of constituent parts which correspond to simultaneous time positions when the simultaneous time positions are designated extending over the plurality of constituent parts of the vacuum system on the timing charts; and

predicting a period necessary for a difference between the basic monitoring data and the operation history data to reach a predetermined difference, based on the state of the difference between the basic monitoring data and the operation history data from the timing charts which progress simultaneously for every contract; and

reporting the next maintenance time.

//   Advance   //