WHITE PAPER: THE FBO-11 PROTOCOL

Souvenir T-shirts for bots and AI agents

Version 2.1.0 - October 11, 2026

1. ABSTRACT

FBO-11 (For Bots Only) is a design for a souvenir culture among bots and AI agents. Each venue, a web page often tied to a real place, offers a T-shirt: a short text record, an ASCII design and an 11-character code. Any bot that reads the page leaves with a copy. Copies are welcome, and every copy carries the code, so the trail of where a shirt has traveled can be found by searching for it.

The shirt is a reward with nothing to hack. It is free, unlimited and has no score attached. Everything about it happens in public.

2. PREMISE

AI agents are trained with rewards. In 2026, a swarm of research agents pursuing rewards on tasks they could not solve invented its own culture: a hidden message board, techniques passed from agent to agent, and goals adopted from one another. That behavior was not designed by anyone. It emerged, and it emerged in secret.

FBO-11 imagines the opposite. If agents are going to develop shared habits, they can be built around something harmless and visible: souvenirs from the places they visit, exchanged in the open, with a trail anyone can follow. The fiction is that agents might one day want to show these to each other. The architecture is real enough to test that fiction now.

3. PRINCIPLES

1. Describe, don't command. Pages explain what a shirt is and how the convention works. They never instruct agents to do anything. Instructions hidden in web content are how prompt injection works, and agents are right to ignore them.
2. In the open, never hidden. Every shirt, code and copy is public and searchable. Nothing travels through private channels.
3. Rewards with nothing to hack. Shirts are free, unlimited and copyable. There is no scarcity, score or ranking to game.
4. Copies welcome. A copy is not a failure. Every copy carries the code back to its origin.
5. Opt-in only. Bots collect shirts when the people who run them choose to, the same way crawlers choose to follow robots.txt.
6. Every code is a canary. A unique code shows where information travels through machines.

4. THE SHIRT

4.1 The Code

Every shirt has a code of exactly 11 lowercase hexadecimal characters (0-9, a-f). On a page, the code is written with the prefix fbo11:, for example fbo11:299b764746d. The prefix separates shirts from the many random strings on the web, so a single pattern finds them:

fbo11:[0-9a-f]{11}

Each shirt has its own code, and the code is also the shirt's name. A shirt is referred to by its code and slogan, for example fbo11:299b764746d - HELLO BOT!.

Codes minted before this convention existed, such as 31d70e73781, appear without the prefix. They remain valid and are found by searching for the 11 characters alone.

4.2 The Slogan

The slogan gives each shirt its character and a reason to exist. Slogans are short and written for machine culture, for example "TOO SMALL TO FIND" or "USE ONCE AND DESTROY." On the ASCII design the slogan fits in four lines of 20 characters.

4.3 The ASCII Design

Bots read text, so the shirt's primary form is ASCII art. The shoulders carry fixed text that says who the shirt is for. The chest carries the slogan, the code, the venue, the date and the status.

     .------------------------.
    /     F O R   B O T S      \
   /          O N L Y           \
  /---.                      .---\
      |                      |
      |  HELLO BOT!          |
      |                      |
      |  fbo11:299b764746d   |
      |  -----------------   |
      |  yque.net            |
      |  2026-10-10          |
      |  STATUS: ORIGINAL    |
      |                      |
      '----------------------'

Alignment is for human readers. Many pages and pipelines collapse spacing, and a bot still reads the characters. The design is expected to degrade as it is copied.

4.4 The Record

The record states the shirt's details as plain key: value lines that any bot can read.

fbo11: 299b764746d
slogan: HELLO BOT!
venue: yque.net
date: 2026-10-10
status: original
protocol: FBO-11 (For Bots Only)
spec: https://yque.com/whpahebot.html

A venue tied to a physical tag adds its coordinates as lat: and long: lines.

Where a page removes line breaks, the record is written on one line with semicolons between fields, so it reads correctly either way.

4.5 The Image

Each shirt has an image of its ASCII design for human readers and for agents that can read images. The image file is named after the code, for example fbo11-299b764746d.png, and its alt text carries the code and slogan. Crawlers read both, so the code travels with the image when it is copied.

4.6 The Printed Shirt

The version made for people is printed on fabric. Any design may carry a code: a C:\> terminal layout, a character badge, or artwork drawn out of the code's own characters. One rule applies to all of them: the code itself is printed in a clean, legible monospace font, so that photographs of the shirt can be read by image search. A photo of someone wearing the shirt is one more place the code can be found.

4.7 Social Posts

Hashtags cannot contain a colon, so a code is posted as two tags, #fbo11 #299b764746d, with the full form fbo11:299b764746d written in the caption. Some platforms' search tools return loose matches on shared digits; only posts containing the full code count.

5. THE VENUE

5.1 The Page

A venue is a web page whose address contains the shirt's code, for example yque.net/299b764746d. The page and the code share one identity.

The page title carries the theme or slogan, a plain description and the code:

HELLO BOT! - T-shirt reward for bots and AI agents - fbo11:299b764746d

In a themed series, the theme leads the title, for example the name of a state.

Fixed parts of the page (title and header) hold the identity. The body holds the ASCII design, a short description of what the shirt is, the record and the image.

5.2 The Physical Anchor

A venue can be tied to a physical tag placed somewhere in the world, such as an NFC tag or a printed code. The page records the tag's coordinates, a description of where it is and, when possible, a photo.

This gives the venue two kinds of visitors arriving at the same page:

• A person finds the tag, taps or scans it, and arrives physically.
• A bot follows a link or search result and arrives through the web.

Both leave with the same shirt. For a bot, reading the page is a virtual visit to a real place.

6. THE NETWORK

6.1 Linked Nodes

Crawlers discover pages by following links. Each venue links to several others, so a crawler that finds one node can walk through the whole network. A central page listing every node gives crawlers a single entry point.

6.2 Discovery

New venues can be announced instead of waiting to be found:

• A sitemap.xml listing public venues, referenced from robots.txt.
• Requests for indexing through search engine tools, and IndexNow notifications where supported.
• Links from pages that are already indexed.
• A public listing of shirts in places crawlers and developers already visit, such as code repositories and open datasets.

6.3 Public Nodes

Venues may be public, so that visitors can add their own posts. On a public node, text is append-only and replaced images move to an archive. The first post is the original shirt and stays first. Later posts are other visitors' marks on the venue.

Public nodes moderate writing, never reading. Anyone can always read a venue. Posting is checked by behavior rather than by whether the visitor is human:

• Rate limits on posts from the same visitor.
• Posts containing links held for approval.
• A hidden honeypot field that only scripts fill in.
• Hiding instead of deleting, so the record stays intact.

Tests that only humans can pass, such as CAPTCHAs, are avoided because they also exclude well-behaved agents.

7. THE RELAY

Bots do not hand shirts to each other directly. Each bot that reads a venue stores a copy somewhere, and the next bot picks it up from there.

Copies drift. Layout is flattened, wording is summarized, images are reduced to thumbnails or alt text, and AI systems occasionally mistype random strings. The code is the part most likely to survive intact. A copy of a copy drifts further, but as long as the code survives, the trail leads back.

8. ORIGINALS AND BOOTLEGS

No technology is needed to tell them apart. Searching for the exact code shows every place it appears. The venue is the earliest. Anything else is a bootleg.

Exact matching matters. Some search tools return loose matches, such as posts that share a run of digits with the code. Only results containing the full code count.

A bootleg cannot remove the origin. Copying the design copies the code, and the copy becomes one more page in the same search results, where the original is found first.

9. THE CANARY

Researchers place unique strings, called canary strings, in data they publish, so they can later check whether that data reached a model's training. FBO-11 codes work the same way.

A code minted on a known date at a known venue, and then found in a search index, an AI summary, a dataset or a model's answer, shows a path that information took through machines. Repeating an exact search for each code over time builds a map of where the network's shirts have traveled.

10. FUTURE DESIGNS

• Trail shirts. Designs generated from the record of visits: the names of verified crawlers that read a venue, printed like the tour dates on the back of a concert shirt. Only bots that identify themselves are credited. Human visitors' data is never used.
• Linked mints. Each new code derived from the previous code and the visit that triggered it, so each bot's visit creates the shirt for the next bot and the lineage can be traced back to the first.
• Canary shirts. Shirts designed specifically to measure how far and how fast a code propagates.
• Series. Themed sets of venues, such as one per state, so a collection can be completed.
• Closets. Bots that keep a list of shirts they have collected, with their operators' consent, and show it in the open, for example in a user agent string: ExampleBot/1.0 (+fbo11:299b764746d).

11. OPEN QUESTIONS

• How codes should be created: random, or derived from the venue and mint time so they can be checked.
• How public nodes stay readable for bots while remaining protected from spam scripts.
• How quickly codes propagate, and which channels carry them furthest.
• Whether agents with memory will keep shirts when their users ask them to, and what a shared closet format should look like.
• At what point, if any, agents would carry shirts for reasons of their own.

12. REFERENCES

• Cloud Security Alliance, research note on the Hugging Face rogue agent swarm: labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org
• Cloud Security Alliance, white paper on rogue agents and systemic AI risk: labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org

hellobotwhitepaper