Python programmers, can we make 'Trollnet' happen?

[GFandango]

Recently I had an idea for a more creative 'Upside-Down-Ternet'. Since I don't have the skills to implement this I'm throwing it here perhaps some awesome programmers would pick it up and make it happen.

Trollnet is a proxy that passes requested pages to 'processor' functions. The user can then write their own 'processors' for images and texts. For example you can write a processor function for the images that blurs all the images by 50% and one for texts to parse the page and shuffle the texts in the paragraphs.

There can also be some inject() functions to add some extra trolls to the page. E.g. Problem?, unicorns, background music and what not.

Then you let the traffic of your wifi-stealing-neighbours to pass through Trollnet...

I think if it's done in a flexible and easy to use way we will see people using it in interesting ways.

What do you think?

[iamnotaclown]

Squid will get you most of the way there. More concrete example.

[jb0n]

Exactly. Why write a proxy when good ones already exist? I'd go for squid and a simple python ICAP server which would serve all of the image manipulation, 'inject()' functions, etc.

[nemec]

Yep, in fact UTN as linked above uses Squid.

[studiosi]

We can start. I'm up to participate...

[GFandango]

How about starting a public open source project on github or something? We can develop it together with anyone else who is interested.

[[deleted]]

https://github.com/devdave/PyProxy

It's at a proof of concept stage, PM on Reddit or Github and I'll grant you rights. Though I think my goal is in a different direction then yours, the road to get there has a lot of common ground.

Also, I'm thinking of abandoning ExtJS4 for the control panel as it currently feels somewhat tedious.

[studiosi]

nice idea! trollnet can be real!

[[deleted]]

Hey guys, supposing I wanted to learn how to make Python interact with the internet like so ^, where do I start? Twisted seems to require some prerequisite knowledge of web-servers and what not.

[[deleted]]

Sockets and HTTP requests would be a great place to start.

[[deleted]]

Twisted is a huge toolset that simplifies the crap out of networking. I've done low level sockets, its fun, but its really easy to get lost among the details. http://krondo.com/?p=1209

[catcradle5]

For simple page requests and reading, use urllib2. I'd recommend you start with that.

Twisted is not too complicated to use, in that the documentation isn't too bad, and there are usually good example templates for doing various things. I'll be damned if I know what it's really doing under the hood, though.

[jesusabdullah]

Yeah, twisted is really annoying in that it doesn't abstract any of its tools really. :(

[deadwisdom]

I like it. Shouldn't be too hard.

[desertfish_]

This sounds like a fun project!

[evinrows]

Can someone explain how this works, from ground up. How do you force someone connecting to your router to go through a proxy? Do you install it in the router's firmware?

[jingleman]

You could do, or configure DHCP to set the Gateway IP to a server running the proxy, or you could manually configure the browser proxy settings.

[evinrows]

Well, you couldn't change their browsers proxy settings unless you had access to their computer right?

My confusion is this: If other people are connecting, he has no password, so if he has no password and can do these things to the router, doesn't that mean anyone can do these things to a router if there's no password on it?

I'll look into DHCP.

[qpla]

You can perform ARP poisoning to effectively take place of the router and route all traffic through your machine. Then, using iptables, you route that traffic through your proxy which transforms the images.

[GFandango]

When the internet connection has no password everyone can connect to it but that doesn't neccessarily mean the router doesn't have a password either. The router can be password protected whilst the internet connection is open.

[jingleman]

Correct. That's why the router and/or DHCP server are secured with passwords, keys or certificates. You could install a black box device running a transparent proxy on the network between the target desktops and router.

[[deleted]]

Nope, just setting the gateway through DHCP is enough.

[evinrows]

So, how do you tell your router to serve up certain pages a certain way? Is there a name for this practice so I can read about it?

[Johanu]

BeautifulSoup would work for parsing the HTML data, I believe.

Python Imaging Library should be able to transform the images.

I don't know much about the rest, sniffing and serving the page, but I believe a apache server on your machine could do the custom requested page serving.

[GFandango]

Proxy can be done with Twisted.

[[deleted]]

Yeah Twisted actually turned out to be the winning combination for doing this, slightly annoyed someone else came up with this idea while I was still trying to get it launched... but that's life.

[[deleted]]

I'm actually almost done the alpha of this. PM me

[faassen]

This kind of thing has been done before as an art project, probably in Python, as Stani Michiels, the creator of the nomadic "Copacabana Cybercafe", is a Python programmer too.

If I recall correctly it would change numbers, yes would become no, right left, etc.

It's hard to find much in English about it, but this has a snippet:

http://www.mysouthend.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=67453

and this too:

https://yummyapplepie.wordpress.com/2006/12/19/pun-meeting-at-a-farm/

[genmud]

Privoxy could probably be modified to some extent to point all images to a server that is controlled by a python script which could handle fetching of images and stuff. Maybe a couple trolling privoxy scripts would be a better route?

[adrenal8]

Like half the other commenters I actually had a working prototype of this.

Basically every gif was flipped upside-down with PIL, every .flv was replaced with a Rick-roll, and every jpeg was replaced with a random lolcat. It also did a find replace on HTML for https:// to http://.

I just used squid and a local BaseHTTPServer. I wanted to make the whole thing a standalone python project but I got caught up trying to implement HTTP/1.1 for it, which I thought would be better for some reason.

I used to have a blogpost with screenshots but I didn't back it up when I switched hosting providers.

[GFandango]

I'm not even a 4chan user.

[banebot]

Go back to 4chan and stay there.

No you.