[tor-reports] [tor-internal] Isis' June Report

[Karsten Loesing]

Hi Isis,

On 7/14/12 3:40 AM, Isis wrote:
> For funsies, I started making an IRCbot (don't worry, it's more "practical"
> than hellais' gunnerbot, though far less entertaining and with little
> potential for channel facilitation), written in Twisted Python (which helped
> me become more familiar with the framework), which listens to nicks for
> questions about specific Tor nodes and queries the Onionoo API to return
> statistics and information to the channel.

Fun!  Looking forward to meeting your bot. :)

> I've discovered that I detest JSON,
> even though the format looks quite pretty. I'm working on making the bot a bit
> smarter before I put it anywhere public; I'd like it to:
> 
>     * Store node information in a saner way, so as not to permit hammering
>       onionoo.

Don't worry too much about that, at least not for the first version.

>     * Contain a Tor instance for retrieval of titles of .onion addresses.

Hmm, I'm not sure what that would do exactly and how it's related to the
other features.

>     * Be capable of, when a user PMs it, taking the user's email address
>       (phone numbers could also be used, in the 18003824968 at eviltele.com
>       format for SMS) and storing it in a way that the server cannot read, but
>       allowing the bot to use it to basically send a crontab report for
>       node(s). Sort of the IRC equivalent of signing up for tor-weather.

Sounds useful.  But wouldn't IRC be the better communication channel to
inform users about problems with their relay?  Like, if I tell the bot
"watch out for gabelmoo" and gabelmoo goes down, it would ping me
telling me "gabelmoo might be down, see https://atlas... for details".
Of course, reliability of the IRC bot is key here.

>     * Implement some sort of machine learning to better interact with nicks,
>       for example, one should be able to ask "I wonder which Tor nodes still
>       allow SMTP on port 25?", and the bot should be able to figure out the
>       correct query to discover that information. Currently, one has to type
>       "node details noise", for example, to get a detailed report on all the
>       noisebridge/noisetor nodes. This implementation could start as a simple
>       ############hidden markov model, just to make queries less commandliney.

Sounds fun.  Let me know if you need more query options in Onionoo, and
we can brainstorm together with Sathya and the Wesleyan students how to
extend its protocol.

Also, let me know when I should add a link to your bot to Onionoo's
project page.

> python -c'import sys;[sys.stdout.write(chr(((~t>>2)*(2+(42&t*((7&t>>10)*2) \
> )<(24&t*((3&t>>14)+2))))%256))for t in xrange(2**19)]'|aplay

Love it! :)

Best,
Karsten