Hive13 IRC Bot

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Hive13 Project
Hive13 IRC Bot
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Status: Active
Start Date: 6/14/2010

Overview

Summary

For a while now I have been meaning to work on an IRC bot for the Hive13 IRC room hosted on freenode.net (Webchat Link).

This bot will start off by just automating simple tasks, for example auto-opping members. A goal of the project is to make the bot easily extensible with new features allowing us to adapt and improve the bot as time goes on.

Source code is currently located at Paul's SVN server http://svn.caffeinesystems.com/hive13/trunk/Hive13JavaChat . It is currently implemented as a NetBeans 6.8 java project. I currently have the project set up so that people can check out the code, but check-ins are disallowed unless you have an account. Until we move the code to a more appropriate location anyone that wants to commit changes can contact me and I (Paul) will set up an SVN account for you.

Longer term goals include tieing the bot into the Twitter API and the Google Calendar API.

Project Manager

• Paul

Contributors

• Add yourself here if you have contributed to this project.

Project Status

User:Paul has found a Java IRC API library that makes accessing the IRC room a lot easier and created a simple demo project. The project has been added to an SVN server. Currently brainstorming ideas for implementation.

What Needs to be Done

• Research the feasibility of various ideas mentioned below.
  • Google Calendar API
  • Twitter API
  • How adaptable is the PircBot library?
• Figure out an easily extensible design for the actual bot.
• Hammer out what all features people might like to see.

Project Information

• SVN Code Repository: http://svn.caffeinesystems.com/hive13/trunk/Hive13JavaChat
  • Public Checkout, contact Paul for commit permissions.
  • Code is being written in Java with NetBeans 6.8
• Project is using the PircBot framework.
  • Homepage: http://www.jibble.org/pircbot.php
  • API Documentation: http://www.jibble.org/javadocs/pircbot/index.html

Goals

IRC Task Automator

Goals

1. Automatically give operator status to Hive13 members who join the IRC room.
   • Username is too easily spoofed, so we need a way to check if the user is logged into an approved Freenode.net account before opping.

Communication Aggregator

A bot would enable us to better tie the chat room into the other communication mediums we use as a group. As it stands now we are fractured into 3 major communication groups:

1. Mailing List
2. IRC Room
3. Meetings

With numerous less utilized mediums:

• Twitter
• Youtube
• Flickr
• Google Calendar
• Hive13 Blog
• Hive13 Wiki

There are of course people that utilize all of these communications mediums, but there are also people that tends to stick to only one or two of them. The bot could help tie the other communication mediums into the IRC room while also tieing the chat room back into the communication loop.

Goals

• Automate alerting other people when someone says they are going to be at the hackerspace.
  • Ex. User123 says, "I am going to be @hive13 in about an hour", Hive13Bot uses the Twitter API to send out a tweet stating: User13 said 'I am going to be @hvie13 in about an hour'
• Someone posts an update on either Youtube, Flickr, or the Hive13 Blog we send out an alert to the chat room, "Jimbo Jones just made a post on the Hive13 blog titled 'Lockpicking at Hive13' http://hive13.org/LockpickingLink"
• Use the Google calendar API to automatically update the topic of the chat room as events draw near.

Research

This section is documenting research that has been done on the various goals. It will have links to additional information if needed.

IRC Automation Research

Auto-Opping Users on Freenode

The simplest way to implement this would be to just have a list of usernames, then when a new user joins a channel, or when the bot joins the channel, simply run through the list of usernames giving each one operator status. However, a major problem with this is that as soon as someone realizes that this is how the bot works, they can just join the channel, set their nick to a members username and receive operator status.

Freenode.net allows users to register usernames and then login with those usernames. If we can find a way to easily confirm that each user is genuinely that user prior to sending the op command, then it would greatly enhance the security of this operation. A quick Google search turns up the following: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#spoofing . This page hints at using something called 'CAPAB IDENTIFY-MSG'. I have yet to determine exactly what this is or how we can use it. The section also links to a perl script, but I do not quite understand what the script is doing.

Resources

• http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#spoofing
• http://www.deaded.com/staticpages/index.php/pircbotdemos -- Other PircBots that we can reference for ideas and design help.