[tor-bugs] #4496 [Tor Support]: Create an IM bot that can send out software and documentation

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#4496: Create an IM bot that can send out software and documentation
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 Reporter:  runa         |          Owner:  runa                     
     Type:  task         |         Status:  needs_information        
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:  Sponsor E: March 15, 2012
Component:  Tor Support  |        Version:                           
 Keywords:               |         Parent:                           
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:                           
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Changes (by mazda):

 * cc: mazda@… (added)


Comment:

 When Iran started messing with Tor's website SSL certificate in Iran, It
 made me start thinking about alternative methods to deliver a Tor Bundle
 to users. I then asked myself, what are some of the most popular services
 and ports in Iran? I watched the traffic on some of my own tunnels and
 noticed Google is the most popular service for my Iranian users. In past I
 used to distribute Tunnelling clients and 1-hop proxy addresses using XMPP
 bots. Idea was that instead of having users call me and ask me directly,
 they can talk to a bot and have 24/7 access to fresh/new proxies. This
 worked really great, as XMPP is almost real-time.

 The XMPP bot can be a php or python program and responds to a list of
 commands with pre-defined responses. The role of the bot is to deliver
 "Official" Tor packages and documentation.

 For example, user would send "farsi windows" to torbot_fa at torproject.org
 and the bot would share the "Farsi Tor Browser Bundle" with the email
 address of the user. The Bot can respond in 2 ways:

 1. Return a publicly accessible link:
 https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1UoFyys_KopMjIyNGE5ZWItYzY5Yi00OTllLTg2ZmYtMWEyMGRmY2RlNGE3

 2. Share the Google Doc file with the user, and Google would shoot out a
 notification email

 We would need to maintain latest copies of Tor packages on Google Docs. In
 order to overcome the storage limits, we can have 1 user created for each
 Language!

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4496#comment:8>
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