--- title: /town/our, a tildebrained irc bot date: 2023-07-23 --- tl;dr: `` is an IRC bot on tilde.town. Commands are just executables in a world-writeable directory. If you're on town, you can create new commands just by putting a script in `/town/our`. Lowering the barrier to entry by so much gave us a pretty nice bot ecosystem, and has just proven to overall be a bunch of fun. ## genesis ``` 2022-04-19: 18:56 i like the idea of having every command be a separate binary 18:59 it does make for rather composable programs (in some cases) 18:59 netcat is neat 18:59 i meant in a [irc] bot 18:59 you could create new commands very quickly [...] 19:01 wait do we have bwrap on here 19:01 idea: a bot which works like this 19:01 where the command directory is public 19:01 so anyone could drop a script there to create a new command 19:01 sounds pretty cool 19:01 very pubnixy 19:03 every command gets run with arguments specifying the user that called the command and (if necessary), additional arguments to the command ``` Basically, at the time I've been thinking about making an `sh(1)` bot framework which would store each command in a separate script. But, I've realized: 1. if the commands are in separate scripts, they could as well just be arbitrary executables 2. the command directory could be world-writeable I grabbed a basic Ruby bot framework I've made the other day, and quickly prototyped [jsbot](https://drewdevault.com/2021/03/29/The-worlds-dumbest-IRC-bot.html)'s weird cousin. ``` 19:49 --> our (beep boop) (dzwdz@localhost) has joined #tildetown 19:49 our/greet 19:49 hi dzwdz!dzwdz@localhost from #tildetown 19:49 \o/ 19:49 /home/dzwdz/code/town/our/cmds 19:49 world writeable 19:49 have fun 19:50 <@vilmibm> whee ``` Others soon started playing with it. [~vilmibm](https://tilde.town/~vilmibm) immediately made some commands in Go, for example. ``` 19:56 our/../../../../../../../bin/ls 19:56 hm! definitely thought that would work :P [...] 19:56 first off 19:56 how dare you assume i'm such a bad programmer 19:56 second off 19:56 our/../../../bin/echo lol 19:56 dzwdz!dzwdz@localhost lol #tildetown 20:13 <@vilmibm> dzwdz: i linked /home/dzwdz/code/town/our/cmds to /town/our ``` ## another (kind) bot After making the proof of concept bot, I just left it running with no other changes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Except it was broke and I wasn't fixing it. Thus, [~kindrobot](https://tilde.town/~kindrobot) took over. ``` 2022-08-24: 04:01 our/timefor dzwdz 04:01 Wed, 24 Aug 2022 06:01:15 +0200 04:14 dzwdz: (when you wake up) for your consideration: I added forking, a persistence data dir, and limited configuration to our. You can check it out in #bots 04:15 You can use "your/..." followed by "your/town" (or any other command) to test forking 04:15 You can use "your/count" to test persistence. ```
...then `our` got her a job at Wikimedia. ``` 2022-10-13: 19:59 When I was interviewed at Wikimedia, I talked about the "our" project that I've contributed a bit to. It seemed like the most relevant to what they were doing which is user defined functions for Wikipedia. 19:59 i can't believe i got the job at wikipedia 19:59 Yeah good job dzwdz :) ``` ## sample commands Look, our is just like any other IRC bot, and the commands people have made are about what you'd expect. Some are just typical utility commands: ``` our/timefor dzwdz Sun, 23 Jul 2023 18:47:44 +0200 our/w Kraków Cracow, , Poland | Sunny 28°C (82°F) (feels 29°C (84°F)) | 33% humidity | 1012 hPa ``` Some are fortune-style commands. ``` our/qotd 00:50:58 "i like to practise my bakery baking bakery in the bakery" our/plan9/fortune Did you know ... that no-one ever reads these things? ``` Some play well-known sports. ``` your/ping our/pong your/ping our/pong your/ping our/pong your/ping our/pong ``` The one I personally use the most, though, is `our/sh`. It's handy both to explain \*nix stuff live, and to just do all sorts of ad-hoc stuff. ``` 2023-07-23: [...] [someone was learning about /dev/shm and tmpfs] /dev/shm IS tmpfs our/sh grep /dev/shm /proc/mounts tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs ro,nosuid,nodev,inode64 0 0 2023-07-24: i'm going to try to write a small article about our how bad of a title is "/town/our, a tildebrained irc bot" also does anyone have #tildetown logs from around 1650394568 our/sh date -d @1650394568 Tue Apr 19 18:56:08 UTC 2022 login, maybe? [~login did turn out to have the logs. thanks for sending them over <3] ``` ## "sandboxes are for little children with tonka trucks" ``` 2022-04-20: 14:37 our/sh rm * 14:37 nico what the fuck ``` First off---don't get the wrong idea here. This wasn't malicious. [~nihilazo](https://itwont.work) was just messing around, knowing that I implemented sandboxing. (also, note that this happened not even 24 hours after the bot went live) But yeah, it's safely sandboxed using [bubblewrap](https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap). The entire filesystem is remounted ro, except a single directory for persistent data, a fresh `/tmp/`, and a fresh devtmpfs (for `/dev/null`). The uid is also spoofed to 0, but that's just for shits and giggles. That being said, the IRC is only accessible internally, so if you can send `our` commands, you can also just run the commands yourself. Everything's logged, too. ## where's the source If you must, the source's at [git.tilde.town](https://git.tilde.town/kindrobot/our). Note that: * I believe that version is outdated * the `cmds/` directory in the repo only includes a small subset of **old** commands * it's still, at its core, a hastily thrown together proof-of-concept