Memer

A small set of entertaining responses built into an irc bot.

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Inspiration

For a few months now, I've been thinking about building an irc bot that just posts memes. Originally at Hoyahacks I was planning to demonstrate bluetooth penetration, but I didn't have the right equipment, so this was sort of a back up in a way.

What it does

When the command ".meme" is said in the irc channel, memer calls an api to get a meme image, then translates it into ascii characters and outputs it (many times 20-30 lines) to the irc chat window. When the command ".trump" is said, memer fetches a random tweet out of the past 20 made by Donald Trump.

How I built it

I'm decent with python, so I found sopel, a python based irc bot right away to get started.

Challenges I ran into

By far the inconsistencies in python between archlinux(my dev machine) and ubuntu(my cloud machine) was the most frustrating part, since ubuntu defaults to python 2 but archlinux defaults to python 3. I also expected the apis to be difficult, but a python library called tweeby came in clutch.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Before I evern started building this bot, I worked for almost a day straight on trying to intercept and read bluetooth packets. I eventually captured the traffic into wireshark, but couldn't read it due to encryption.

As for the irc bot, I've never built or dealt with automating irc, so it proved to be quite interesting to discover that it is actually pretty easy.

What I learned

The night I began Hoyahacks, I barely knew anything about bluetooth sniffing & packet capture, but by the end I could tell you what a bluetooth device broadcasts, how it broadcasts, and how to intercept the traffic. I also discovered that the new Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is significantly less secure and is thus much easier to hack that earlier bluetooth technologies.

What's next for Memer

I'll plan to keep adding random entertaining things to the irc bot as an ongoing side project, but I mainly want to focus on the improvement of bluetooth sniffing and packet capture. I could barely find any research in this area, which is one of the main reasons I want to help develop it.

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