Botnet

FreeRice

What is this site? It is generaly simplier version of wikipedia. You will find there selected articles. Enjoy!

Free Rice

URL	freerice.com
Commercial?	No
Type of site	click-to-donate site
Owner	United Nations World Food Program
Created by	John Breen
Current status	Active

FreeRice is a website where users play various educational, multiple-choice games in order to fight world hunger. For every answer the user answers correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated. The games include English vocabulary (the game the site began with), multiplication tables, pre-algebra, chemistry (basic and intermediate), English grammar, basic foreign language vocabulary for English speakers (French, German, Italian, and Spanish), geography (world capitals and country identification), and identification of famous artwork. In March of 2009 FreeRice was donated to the UN World Food Programme.

Subjects

Although English vocabulary is the original and default subject, players may choose from different subjects, including mathematics, chemistry, geography, art, and foreign languages (French, Spanish, Italian, and German). The maximum level of difficulty varies between subjects.

Sustenance

In exchange for advertisements on the website, various sponsors donate the money necessary to pay for the rice and other costs to run FreeRice. The donations are distributed by the United Nations's World Food Programme (WFP), starting with Bangladesh. FreeRice's partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The most common countries receiving rice are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bhutan, Uganda, and Nepal, even though FreeRice can travel all over the world (as of early 2008). By this time, the site's creator had given over US$213,000 to the WFP which encourages people to visit freerice.com. On 20 November, 2007, the WFP launched a campaign to "feed a child for Thanksgiving."

Effectiveness

Average number of adults fed per day by daily average of each month.

In its first six months of operation, FreeRice donated over 42 billion grains of rice. One month after the inception of the viral marketing program, users had earned enough points for one billion grains of rice. The United Nation's World Food Programme stated that this amount could feed 50,000 people for one day, since it takes 400 grams or about 19,200 grains of rice to feed one adult for a day. Using this calculation, enough rice was donated in 2008 to feed over 6,000 people daily for each day of that year. Since its inception, as of March 28, 2010, FreeRice has donated over 80 billion grains of rice. This is enough to provide food for 3,850,000 people for one day.

Scripts

Since FreeRice became well-known through Digg.com and other news sources, many programming-adept users created scripts to automatically play the game for them. The scripts operate far faster than humans alone and run for 24 hours a day. At first, the scripts got only ≈1/4 of the words correct by random chance. Eventually, these bots were adapted with automated online dictionary search, dictionary files, and word database dumps so the programs can choose the correct answers the first time more often. The word database dumps were created so when the incorrect answer was chosen, the bots would record the correct answer the next page would show. Thus, the bot would choose the correct answer whenever it happened upon the same words later. Due to the growing number of scripts used on FreeRice, the number of rice donated has remarkably risen. Currently there are no rules governing "ricebots", as they are called. Until those rules are formed, anyone is free to program and use the scripts. With a delay of about 3 seconds between iterations, it is estimated that a script can feed about 8 people per day, if running 24/7. The idea was taken even further to create a multi-threaded bot which can run fifty or more browser instances at a time, enough to produce as much as 600,000 grains of rice per hour or to feed 720 people per day. One script with 1,000 threads was able to donate over 3,000,000 grains in just a few hours.

Donated rice comes from the advertisements from sponsors. Therefore, abuse of scripts could lead to catastrophe, as advertisers prefer that actual people view their advertisements. Knowing the existence of the bots, FreeRice updated their FAQ explaining the potential damage of botting. Some bots have made changes to make sure they won't spoil the FreeRice spirit.

It could be argued that using scripts could harm name brand support in the long run. If advertising companies realize that the ads are not being read by humans, they might decide to remove their support. This has yet to be seen.

Awards

Yahoo! Pick of the Year 2007 – Charity Category – Winner

Berkman Award to Freerice.com creator, John Breen. He was recognized with a Berkman Award on May 16, 2008 for creating FreeRice.com. At the Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s tenth anniversary gala dinner, recipients of the Berkman Awards were chosen for their outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society over the past decade.

Monthly count

August 1, 2010 10,364,300

August 2, 2010 14,520,150

August 3, 2010 15,894,020

August 4, 2010 15,686,690

August 5, 2010 15,724,750

August 6, 2010 15,100,930

Total All Dates 80,927,902,680

Milestones

• October 7, 2007 – FreeRice launches with 830 grains of rice donated on its first day
• November 10, 2007 – FreeRice breaks the one-day 100,000,000-grain milestone with 122,377,240 donated grains
• November 28, 2007 – With continued sponsor support, FreeRice doubles the number of grains donated for each correct definition from 10 to 20
• December 17, 2007 – FreeRice breaks the one-day 300,000,000-grain milestone with 358,559,540 donated grains
• December 19, 2007 – 10 billion grains donated in total
• January 20, 2008 – 15 billion grains donated in total
• February 25, 2008 – 20 billion grains donated in total
• April 2, 2008 – 25 billion grains donated in total
• April 30, 2008 – 30 billion grains donated in total
• May 30, 2008 – 35 billion grains donated in total
• July 29, 2008 – 40 billion grains donated in total
• September 29, 2008 – 45 billion grains donated in total
• November 11, 2008 – 50 billion grains donated in total
• February, 2009 – 60 billion grains donated in total
• September 2009 - 70 billion grains donated in total
• June 2010 - 80 billion grains donated in total

References

External links

• FreeRice
• FreeRice Donation Totals
• WFP on FreeRice
• The Hunger Site
• Poverty.com
• Tektalk Magazine A Chinese Online Magazine that donates rice to WFP for every visit
• Friends of the World Food Program