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IRCSeek's activities aren't anything new.

In the past we've had bots by google do similar, bots from ChatScan, and bots from IRCIrchiver, among others.

Current discussion on SearchIRC about this topic: http://searchirc.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=6264

The thing about this incarnation is that they're aware they're going to be banned, so they're using TOR to proxy their bots online with no means to identify them. Then the bots sit in channels logging without notifying anyone of their activities.

It appears to be intentionally underhanded.

If it had any effect, it didn't show up in the graphs: http://searchirc.com/network/EFnet,daily

I'll admit, from a distance IRC may seem like a gigantic warez breeding ground--and with sites like http://searchirc.com/ such channels are easy to find, but many of the IRC networks DO contain channels whose members don't distribute illegal material. I have such a channel, and all we do is idle--er, I mean chat most of the time.

Networks operators need to take stronger initiatives to cleaner servers (those that care), or soon the mpaa and riaa may bite (and rip in half) them.

Rizon IRC Networks is the Astalavista Box of IRC. IRC itself is not the problem, and places like Dal Net or EfNet that are just too large for their own good cannot always stop problematic clients or channels. Rizon, though, prouds itself as a haven of warez, cracks and piracy of movies and music. Have a problem with someone distributing your software and bring it up with the admins, they will k-line you, not the traders.

To see how massive such an idea of illegality is, and probably how little people in law enforcement care about IRC, just see the server listing from Search IRC of currently linked servers on the network. It's frightening.

P.S. This message is provided as education, as I do not condone nor promote piracy or warez in any format.

There are currently 1,235,632 users on 7,650 servers.

The only problem is, no one really seems to know what is going on!

Speculation on cause has ranged from DDoS attacks to having to do with the Microsoft leaked source code.

There has been an ongoing discussion about this since feb 15th

1) SearchIRC does not have arbratary limits on networks, requiring them to have N number of users to get listed. All networks are included when possible. So it typically has several hundred additional networks listed than any other site out there.

2) SearchIRC lists ALL channels, netsplit.de and others only store channels with >N users, so they only have partial channel lists. Thus SearchIRC has ~300,000 more channels to search through than the others.

3) SearchIRC has automated methods of detecting nevtwork merges, and removal of temporary channels (e.g; A user who joins #fuck-all-ircops before being klined). Without automating things like this, you end up with duplicate channel lists, and duplicate networks which will bloat your user counts and channels indexed.

Check them out for yourself and compare.

Try something like this

A lot of people seem to be missing the point: It seems unlikely that Google would archive ALL channel logs. I mean it'd be really rather unfeasible technically. In order to join all 372628424682 or whatever channels on the largest networks, Google would need about 50,000 bots logged on at the same time. At this point, the nets could easily see the Google bots, and ban them for network abuse.

More likely is that, as the summary suggests, Google may be trying to emulate the functionality of something like netsplit.de. I'd be quite happy if they did this, as although netsplit.de is quite good, its channel search leaves a lot to be desired, and always seems to miss out a lot of channels, seemingly unable to get a reliable channel list for a lot of networks (they're pretty hostile to /LIST's now, unfortunaely). SearchIRC is a terrible channel search engine, because it fails to rank the results in order of number of people in the channel, for some bizarre reason, making its search somewhat useless.

If Google could implement a nice, polished service similar to netsplit.de, I'd be happy. If they tried to log everyone's chats in every channel, I (and I supect most IRCops) would be most unhappy, and expect to see Google's bots get banned from nets and channels very quickly.

With websites like SearchIRC giving anyone who wants it, instant access to over a thousand IRC networks, I don't see that MSN unmoderated chat going away as being a big deal to the overall scheme of things on the internet.

DALnet is a poor example since it ranks 6th overall, and has been having issues with DoS attacks for quite some time now. The top 4 IRC networks are around 100,000 concurrent users on avg, with Quakenet at close to 150,000. With IM, you're basically at one company's whim. IRC has existed long before the WWW or IM. I'll bet that it will exist at least as long as WWW/IM, if not longer.

Maybe they're moving to IRC

It's funny how the death of IRC has been talked about for years now. Yet IRC keeps growing. My server on Undernet (which was the largest for almost 4 years in a row) was removed due to ISP backing being removed -- yet if you read about it online, it's removal was attributed to DoS attacks. Much of IRC's background is clouded in myth or just outright lies. Check out http://searchirc.com -- IRC networks are MUCH bigger than they ever used to be, and there are much MORE IRC networks than ever before. SearchIRC currently has close to 700, and the list isn't close to being completed.

It's funny how the death of IRC has been talked about for years now. Yet IRC keeps growing. My server on Undernet (which was the largest for almost 4 years in a row) was removed due to ISP backing being removed -- yet if you read about it online, it's removal was attributed to DoS attacks. Much of IRC's background is clouded in myth or just outright lies. Check out http://searchirc.com -- IRC networks are MUCH bigger than they ever used to be, and there are much MORE IRC networks than ever before. SearchIRC currently has close to 700, and the list isn't close to being completed.