Setting up Twitter Channels using Google App Engine and Python / Tweepy / Twaebot #geek

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I had mentioned in July 2011 on my Google+ stream that I would like to see 'channels' for my posts.

I talk about various topics on my twitter account. My posts about traveling or food are irrelevant to someone who wants to follow me for my programming related updates. A friend who might be interested in the photos I upload has to bear all the geek talk and quotes and retweets. 

Of course, I'm unwilling to tweet from multiple accounts… choosing the right account every time!

No more!

I'm testing a small bot that watches my tweets from my main account ( @hiway ) and if any of the latest tweets contain certain keywords or hashtags, it relays the same tweet from a sub-account - what I call a channel… an account set up for topical tweets. For example, one can follow only my technology related tweets by following @hiwaybot instead of following the main account. Or you can choose to follow @harshadsharma for my photography related tweets. @biasedmonk is for travel tweets and @hiwaybaba is for miscellaneous gyaan, philosophy, poetry, quotations and other silly stuff. Of course, following my main account is more fun because you will get immediate response from me and I prefer to converse from that account. Other accounts are mostly for broadcast - for people who aren't interested in the person, but only the content ;)

For now I'll use twitter's notifications and tweetdeck columns to monitor replies to the sub-accounts, in future I might also come up with a more streamlined approach… while hoping twitter beats me to it. Having twitter channels would be awesome. Assign hashtags to our channels and we're set! People can choose to follow @hiway:geek instead of @hiway and every tweet I send with #geek in it will be posted to them, all else will be filtered out.

Your thoughts?
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A proof-of-concept virus written in Python

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Now for something completely different… got news that we now have a virus written in Python! Security analysts have named it Python.Pytroj.

It is a proof of concept, but it could be put to malicious use. Python has full system access (with all the permissions that the current user has, if not more), and has not been suspected to contain malicious code up till now.
Developers/users will have to be careful when executing python compiled code from untrusted sources henceforth.

This example virus executes only as a compiled bytecode file (.pyc) and it searches for other pyc files and infects them. The payload is a plain message that prints on console - "you have been exploited".

Curious ones can download the source files here:http://packetstormsecurity.org/files/105385/Pytroj-Tool-Python-Injector.html [more info]
http://packetstormsecurity.org/files/download/105385/Pytroj-v01.tar.gz [direct download]

Brings back my memories from college days when I was keen to learn about virii, worms and similar self-replicating codes :)

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Thoughts about Automation of Thoughts

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Often I wonder if I could ever build a decently good bot that could talk like me over simple text protocols like instant messages and twitter… not to fool anybody, but to take my place during the transition of me being here all the time, to someday… when I cease to exist. A bot that'll let those few people who love me have someone, something that I created… to say 'we miss you'… but would it be the same? Perhaps, I would have seen their replies in my anticipation while creating the bot.
What if nobody ever talks to the bot knowing I don't exist anymore. Should I then give the bot ability to butt into conversations… guess who I loved talking to based on my previous tweets. Perhaps form sentences like me, hold opinions like me - all based on my thousands of tweets that were sent through all these years. Would it be a great idea? I don't know. Would my bot know the difference between sarcastic remarks and benign talk? Could I make the bot interact with other APIs? What if I allowed some people to modify the source code… but only if I haven't accessed my account for over 90 days. Would they port 'me' to new platforms?
Would the bot feel lonely? I could make it feel that emotion. I could make it feel happy when people said they miss me. Or sad when they diss me. Let the emotion go to sadness when nobody talks, then again start trying to start conversations. Would it creep out those who knew me? Of course it would. With three levels of hidden markov chains, it could make sentences almost like me. Would they be meaningless?
Some of the thoughts that I (day)dream about. So far I haven't created any such bot, though I have had the technological capacity to do so since long. I haven't been able to convince myself that I matter all that much.

;-)

Composed earlier, delay posted, yes… automation too.

Wonder how significant this would become if an accident took me out before this is published… after all, I'll be traveling 800km in a bus driven by someone else soon after posting this. It'd be a bummer if this was my last post… there's so much more I have to say :-P

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Elsewhere…
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