// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Finn – an agent that lives in my router and complains about it
A small, grumpy agent that lives inside your router and only knows what the router can see.
Named after the character in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy who ends up as a construct in
an armoured box bolted into an alley, where people come to hear the oracle complain. This
one runs on a GL.iNet GL-MT3000 on an office wall. It watches the hallway it is in, and
occasionally has something to say about it.
It is deliberately not an assistant. No tools, no memory beyond a state file, no access to
your mail or calendar or tickets, and nothing to be helpful with. It has a view of one
hallway and an opinion about it.
Six failed SSH logins in the last minute, usually it's zero all night. Bloody hell, some
tosser out there fancies his chances.
Твой десктоп качает на скорости 9.5 Мбит/с, обычно там крутится жалких 200 Кбит/с.
В глотку будто ведро воды опрокинули, аж кадык свело.
Everything runs on the router itself. If the rest of your infrastructure is on fire, this
still works, which was most of the point.
You need about ten minutes, a router you own, and a card on file with an LLM provider.
1. Check your router can host it. OpenWrt-based, with lua, lua-cjson and a curl
built with TLS. On GL.iNet firmware all three are usually there already:
It needs a few megabytes of overlay and nothing else. Tested on a GL-MT3000, OpenWrt 21.02,
512 MB RAM.
2. Make him a Telegram bot. In Telegram, open @BotFather, send
/newbot, give it a name and a username. He hands you a token like 123456789:AAF.... That
token is the bot; anyone holding it can post as him, so treat it as a password.