IRC Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 44 Infer Social Networks from IRC

Most IRC channels are like small communities,
and communities make patterns. Use this hack to produce pretty
drawings of the social structure in your channel.

If you see a group of people talking to one
another in real life, it is reasonable to assume there is some kind
of relationship or friendship between them. The same principles can
be applied to IRC channels. By drawing lines between users, you can
produce some interesting visualizations of the social networks
present.

PieSpy
(http://www.jibble.org/piespy) is
a tool that can be used to generate these diagrams automatically. It
is an IRC bot that monitors a set of channels and attempts to
estimate what the social network structure should look like. It does
this by guessing who is talking to whom. The name of the bot
originates from a channel called #pie, where it was first used to
"spy" on the channel inhabitants
and produce social network diagrams.

7.2.1 Installing PieSpy

You can download PieSpy from
http://www.jibble.org/piespy. It
is precompiled, but the source code is also available if you feel
like hacking it yourself. Unzip the archive into a new directory.

If you have Java installed, the bot is ready to run by executing the
run.bat file on Windows or
run.sh on Linux/Unix.

The README.txt file briefly describes the bot
and the commands that it accepts.

7.2.2 Configuring PieSpy

All
configuration
settings are specified in config.ini. Open this
file in your favorite text editor.

You will need to change the server settings so you can tell the bot
which server to connect to, which channel to join and so on:

# Server Settings:
Nick = HackSpy
Server = irc.freenode.net
ServerPassword = 
Port = 6667
ChannelSet = #irchacks

The Nick field sets the nickname of the bot. The
bot will connect to the specified Port on the
Server, using the
ServerPassword if required (some IRC servers are
password protected). When the bot
connects to the server, it will join all channels listed in the
ChannelSet.

PieSpy is capable of running in multiple channels. If you want to add
extra channels to the ChannelSet, simply separate
them with commas, for example:

ChannelSet = #irchacks,#jibble

You need to change just one other setting, the administrator password:

# Administrator settings:
Password = password

The default value is "password," so
you may wish to change it. This is the password that is used to
remotely control the bot over IRC.

7.2.3 Running PieSpy

Windows
users can run PieSpy by double-clicking on the
run.bat file. On
Linux/Unix, you can run PieSpy by
executing the run.sh script, like so:

% chmod u+x run.sh % ./run.sh

The bot will then connect to the server and join the appropriate
channels.

If you are running the bot in a Linux/Unix terminal window without access to an X server, you may need to edit run.sh so that it has -Djava.awt.headless=true as a parameter to the java command. If you do not do this, the bot will be unable to draw anything!

7.2.4 Getting Output from PieSpy

PieSpy will generate output in
PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
format. All modern web browsers can view these types of files. The
default output directory is ./images/, and the
bot will create new directories inside this one for each channel
it's in.

Each time the bot detects a change in the structure of the social
network for a channel, it will write a new image. If your bot is in
#irchacks, the most recent image for that channel will always be
called irchacks-current.png. An archive is also
kept, allowing you to piece together frames to create animations.
Archive images are saved as
irchacks-00000000.png,
irchacks-00000001.png, and so on.

The bot will also save a file called
irchacks-restore.dat. This contains information
about the data used to create the images and allows the bot to save
its state between invocations. If your machine crashes for some
reason, you can restart the bot, and it will continue from where it
left off without having to rebuild the social network from scratch.

If your output directory is visible to a web server, you can tell
people to look at irchacks-current.png, and they
will always see the latest state of the social network for #irchacks.

7.2.5 Controlling PieSpy

PieSpy
can be controlled remotely if you know the administrator password. If
you have left it as the default of
"password,"
other people may be able to take control of your bot.

Each command you send to the bot must be sent as a private message.
For example, you can get information about the graphs being made by
the bot by sending the
stats command. Each command must be prefixed
by the password, like so:

/msg HackSpy  password  stats

The bot will respond by saying how much data it has collected for
each channel:

<HackSpy> #irchacks: Graph: 11 nodes and 0 edges.
<HackSpy> #jibble: Graph: 17 nodes and 6 edges.

If there are not yet any edges in the graph, the bot will not be able
to generate any output. You will have to wait until people start
chatting in that channel.

If you want to remove the bot from a channel, send the
part command:

/msg HackSpy  password  part #irchacks 
* HackSpy has left #irchacks

To make the bot go back to that channel, send the
join command:

/msg HackSpy  password  join #irchacks * HackSpy has joined #irchacks

If someone is being silly on the channel and you want the bot to
ignore her, you can add her nickname to the
ignore list in
config.ini. You can also add nicknames to the
bot's ignore list while it is running, by using the
ignore command. It is sometimes useful to add
so-called welcome bots
to the ignore list; otherwise, they end
up looking rather popular with everybody:

/msg HackSpy  password  ignore WelcomeBot

WelcomeBot will now be ignored whenever it says anything, so it
won't be included in the social network. If
WelcomeBot already existed in the graph, it would have been removed
when you used the ignore command.

If you do not have direct access to the file store on which the bot
is running, you can tell it to send you the current image via DCC:

/msg HackSpy   password  draw  #jibble 
<HackSpy> Trying to send "jibble-00000014.png"... If you have difficulty in
receiving this file via DCC, there may be a firewall between us.

The bot will then send the file to you via DCC. Note the warning
about firewallsif you are unable to connect directly to the
bot, you will not be able to receive the image.

Using the raw command, you can tell the bot to send a
raw line to the IRC server. If you know enough about the IRC
protocol, you will be able to get the bot to do practically anything
you want with this command. For example, to get the bot to send a
message to the channel, you could do this:

/msg HackSpy  
password
 raw PRIVMSG #irchacks  :Hello, I'm a PieSpy bot! 

7.2.6 The Results

When you look at the output from the
PieSpy bot, you will see a collection of
nodes scattered about. Some of these nodes will have lines connecting
them to show that there is some kind of relationship present.

The diagram shown in Figure 7-1 was taken a couple
of days after the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference in 2004. A large number of attendees used the channel to
chat with one another. The graph shows only the active users at that
time. In particular, note how popular the user
"jibot" seemsjibot is an IRC
bot that introduces people when they join the channel, so PieSpy
infers relationships between them.

Figure 7-1. PieSpy running in #etech after the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2004

Strong relationships are represented with thicker, shorter lines with
more opacity. PieSpy uses temporal decay to ensure that each
relationship slowly fades away over time, resulting in much more
exciting animations. If you are feeling adventurous, you can try
changing the temporal decay settings in the
config.ini file.