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Talk City Closing Doors To IRC
sparky writes "Talk City is going to cut off access to people using any but their proprietary IRC client starting on 12 April. This is a modified version of Pirch, so it runs only on Win32 and MacOS. Oh, yeah, it also runs ads for them, and has a reader board. They are effectively cutting off from their IRC network users of free software, and people who value choice, even with proprietary software. Perhaps their users should consider Open Projects Network?" You may even find some alleged Slashdot Authors there.
The headline says "to people using any but their proprietary IRC client starting on 12 April. This is a modified version of Pirch, so it runs only on Win32 and MacOS. " Which isn't quite correct...Talkcity will be supporting EZTalk a Java client which works on PowerMacs using Netscape Communicator 4.7.2, and in some cases using MRJ 2.2 through Internet Explorer 5.0 for the Mac. It may work on earlier versions of Internet Explorer for the Mac or Netscape, but I haven't tested it. Pirch does _not_ work on the Mac without the aid of emulation, contrary to the article that was posted. And Talkcity will also support WebTV access as well. Scriptable IRC clients are not supported on Talkcity, such as Ircle for the starting on April 12th. However, the author of Ircle is still negotiating with Talkcity to find a way to lower the restriction, and he can be contacted at onno@macresponse.nl if you want to give him support. I suggested that he make a version of Ircle with no scripting support, because Talkcity is actually worried that scripts are causing the room floods that have happened frequently. These floods were the original incentive Talkcity had to make this chat client decision. However, that does not explain the fact that Snak, another Mac chat client which doesn't support scripting won't be allowed either. If you wish to complain, please visit: http://www.talkcity.com/help/egain/ to send your comment directly to Talkcity.
This is capitalism. What do you expect these businesses to do, have losses every quarter but stay open just to serve you? Many dot-com companies will come and go in the next few years as they struggle to find a way to make a profit.
I never thought capitalism was a great thing, but i'm not nearly as surprised by it's grinding gears as you are.
SlashNET has a JAVA client that lets you connect to the network. It's somewhat crude compared to a standard client, but it works.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing
the web page and force me to view adds
Ah, but some are getting the hang of just this idea. cdmag.com is one where I noticed it first. Click on a handful of reviews and articles, every so many it brings up a large picture ad right in the center with a link at the bottom and something like, "click here to go on to the article." I've also seen it a few other places, but they weren't ones I frequent so I forgot 'em. What's most disgusting is they do this on top of their constantly-refreshing banner ads at the top. Eek.
If you want a "clean" sort of IRC, hack the server code to boot, ban IPs, etc anyone saying bad words repeatedly. Then have a bunch of people on hand for users to report abuses to, etc. etc. It certainly is possible, without resorting to banner-ad schemes.
I'm getting a dog one day soon. I figure by the time I take it out for walks, I'll have to have a leash with banner ads going down it. There's no end to where these mopes will put advertising.
The problem there is there are folks (often younger people) who get a laugh taunting, cursing, etc at everyone on "chat rooms." If some folks want it better, great. They can have their servers and all. If you want to curse out people for no particular reason, there's still 4.2 billion EFNet (and the like) servers. As the Internet gets bigger and bigger, more and more jerks come out of the woodwork. This whole scheme is voluntary, it's not like this TalkCity is the only chat service on the market (yet).
(Switching networks is a royal pain in the ass, though. I kinda feel bad for all the poor shmucks who haven't left TC yet.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
No, see the problem is that as the ads proliferate, sellers of 'free' services think that the quality of their product can go into the shitpot.
I think that even isn't as big a problem as the problem you refer to later -- that the ads become the default, and you can't avoid them. With the exception of premium channels, C-SPAN, and AMC, ads are almost impossible to avoid on television. And even the premium channels show movies with product tie-ins. Even PBS has gradually allowed "sponsors" more and more advertising, despite still begging for dollars.
It's pretty obvious this rampant marketing does have an effect on us and our values. While I actually have a higher opinion of our society than most (we're less racist, less religiously intolerant, and in general more egalitarian than just about any society ever), we are certainly rather materialistic. And the rampant marketing isn't helping.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
"I probably shouldn't respond to a such an elitist, glaringly unsupported claim, but I will throw prudence to the wind and point out that the percentage of Linux users on the 'net is statistically insignificant, so Talk City loses nothing, "big chunk" or otherwise."
/net, IPN, DalNet, ...etc.
Cutting out any group whether it be 50 or 50,000 is not a good idea. Why should I install win32/macos, then install their client just so I can get on their network? There are tons of open networks out there. Unet, Efnet,
I would much rather just at add a tab to Xchat then fire up another client or a browser. TC just sounds like a free AOL chat.
I have to return some videotapes...
That's not all. Phone users in either Norway or Sweden (can't recall which) have this option right now, but as you may know, local calls are also metered in Europe, so I think this isn't just an option for long distance. In fact, I'm not sure it's even available for long distance.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Yes, I quite agree with RuneB here. TalkCity have a rather.. interesting.. technical staff rooster (Who, of course, will be the first to get rounded up against the wall and shot when the revolution comes). I suppose one can argue for ages about the whole sincerity of the place, which as opposed to technical competence -can- be argued about. You got a few good people trying, and an administration paying $10 per hour to the hosts, when not trying to get rid of them and get volunteers to do it all for free. *shakes head* It could work, but not with that management. Pity to see them even make money.
Now, where's the third rider of the apocalypse..
Where's I three?
Of course, dont let the fact that they pay you cloud the objectivity.. *shrugs*
There's at least another dozen places to chat on IRC, netwise. I've been on undernet for, geez, 5 years or so now. I doubt seriously losing one corporate sponsored IRC net will harm life.
Actually the question(s) wasn't (weren't) rhetorical, I'd really like to know who pays for what and where they get the money to do it with.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
--------------------------------
We don't need no thought control.
Too much corporatism on the Internet these days. There's a thousand other places to go on the Internet. TC will not be one of them for me, I cannot live with Orwellian measures to restrict free speech.
It's been fun... Goodbye.
------------------------------------
Enough said...
here at BGSU they deny all incoming connections to resnet boxen so any identd requests are denied and MANY IRC servers won't allow you to connect (and #linux on efnet won't let you join w/a ~username@)
yeah, there are ways around it, but I honestly don't believe that the benefits of blocking the connections (Napster) are more abundant than not doing so...
IRC is a part of the Internet. Block http and only allow your users to use your proprietary fucking browser and see how your userbase will dwindle... I don't understand ISP's sometimes.
that wasn't the point. Why even post shit like that?
As an Windows AIM user, I was severely disappointed with GAIM when I tried it out. I was running the beta version of AIM (no flames please) and GAIM lacks *tons* of features. Even ones that have been around forever (font face/color changes without having to do the HTML tags each time, et. al.)
__________________________________________________ ___
rooooar
Who cares? Aren't there already dozens of regular IRC networks? Undernet, EFnet, Dalnet, Ircnet, openprojects, and probably a couple dozens more.
Jump through hoops? Correct me if I'm wrong, but there were already several functioning IRC-nets before Talk City came along. So who cares if Talk City goes bad, just switch to another net!
I admit that I hadn't heard of Talk City before today, so I may be missing something important here.
--
"But I'm still like a little kid, see?
I just don't know when to quit."
- Rei
"But I'm still like a little kid, see?
I just don't know when to quit."
- Rei
The only client that works for Talk City on MacOS is their propietary Java client.
Fact-checking is lots of fun. Let's try it some time.
I can't see the point.
There are lots of IRC-Servers out there in the net. Why cry when one tries to fuck with it's users?
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
most either use their TCPirch or a linux client. A few others (10-40% at times) use webtv.
actually, it was 2 users:
1) bad-seed who floods with the bad messages and kicks himself
2) CiA`/sax-007 who has the multiple nick flood with joins/parts or message (seed has gotten ahold f this recently).
There are over 2000 hosts, but maybe 500 are active, of which maybe 150 are very active (host regularly).
Well, I think part of the problem is that the servers are managed by some not-so-smart people. I know that they know how they could fix it, but either corp (sorprate division) is not letting them, or thye are idiots.
Typical. Just as I'm planning on setting up a linux desktop.
On the other hand, who the heck are they?? Never heard of them, so I doubt I'll miss 'em. Another propritary chat server - oh joy. I'm sure the 10's of thousands of us who use Regular IRC won't miss them at all.
And anyway, where would IRC be without a good old fashioned channel takeover.
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
Google has started doing this now, you can sign up
to maintain a branch, or just click through the
trees that they've got their already. Google has
the nice simple interface as always that works
remarkably well in lynx. The people that run
google say that they won't go into the "portal"
business, which to me is a good thing. I just
want to efficiently find information dammit!
Longest running?
Last I checked EFNet Dalnet and Undernet used to be one, but split due to ircop's not playing nice.
I think they are tied for longest running.
That is unless history changes, I hate it when it does that without telling me.
But if this network does such a thing, why would you want to go back there in the first place? The only thing I can think of is to flame and be an ass ;)
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Leela: "Oh no! Ads!"
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Not meant to be flamebait or anything (merely informing the poster above...)
I am assuming that they run their own ircd
You bet they do!
Microsoft Exchange Chat Service!
Microsoft's own special perversion of RFC 1419!
WHO CARES?
This is less relevant than CompuServ annoncing in has stock quotes!
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Almost all of the people semi proficient with the Mac tend to use Ircle (or derivative), which does not have the capability to connect to their servers. Yeah, there's the option of EZTalk - but blech, who wants to use that ugly Happy Cheery JoyJoy thing? Certaintly not all the Mac people who left.
:) Although I remember trying it a long time ago, to see how bad it was, and I was thoroughly impressed, the wrong way of course.
And the CGI driven IRC - the Web, IMNSHO, was not designed for IRC
Good day,
Derek
So when the bubble bursts there's going to be piles of cheap networking kit about. We just have to wait for the corporate world to go belly up. then all we need to do is lay our hands on the hardware that is no longer being used and we can build the new internet, with no ad's and a thrilling lack of spammers.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one group that can save us from this corporate hell. and that is the sharks of capitalism. at some point they are going to turn on all those tasty internet startups, and strip them of everything that isn't nailed down. So far we have seen the startup's getting one over on the financiers because they have managed to sell the idea that pure ideas have a value. however when the time comes for the financiers to rip the guts out of the company, they will find that what they have to sell is more than a little insubstantial. this may be why the bubble has not burst yet. the financiers see there being far too much chance that they will be left carrying the can for the inherant problems in internet company production. They have put vast ammounts of money in, and if one person panics, it might bring the whole system down.
Bring on the Crimson Permanent Assurance
Talk City is not shooting itself in the foot. First, it is entirely irrelevant which client one uses when connecting to an IRC channel, as long as that client provides adequate (or better) functionality. Second, most Talk City members use the browser-accessible software, so the few dissenters who will now whine (on cue) about their loss of freedom will not harm Talk City one bit. Third, the only flavors that are important in a chat room are the flavors of content, not of the OS or the client. Lastly, anything which limits the disruptive abilities of script kiddies and other losers is welcome.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
That depends on how far they go. I could be jumping the gun here, but It strikes me that they will probably go the doubleclick route - profiling individual users to target banner adds.
There is nothing in the Talk City announcement that should logically lead you to that conclusion.
So not supporting Linux means that they immediatly loose a big chunk of the brightest section of the populace as potential users.
I probably shouldn't respond to a such an elitist, glaringly unsupported claim, but I will throw prudence to the wind and point out that the percentage of Linux users on the 'net is statistically insignificant, so Talk City loses nothing, "big chunk" or otherwise.
It's a common misconception that lack of source code makes you safe. It doesn't - it just gives you a false sense of security.
Nor did I imply that lack of source code makes you safe. Talk City took their action because of the exploits of a cretinous few, who might have been using Open Source toys, or maybe not. Hell, they might have been using BeOs or MacOS, it doesn't matter. Flood attacks can be easily accomplished whether the client is open or closed, no dissasembly required.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Then came Undernet in an attempt to add some security to the threadbare IRCd with the X, W bots.
Then came Dalnet in an attempt to add security without the bandwidth consumption that the X, W bots took.
EFnet is usually agreed on as being the longest running IRC network
I love OPN - there are a lot of networks who could learn a lot from it.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
woh, what stations are YOU watching? Most channels in Ontario, Canada, at least, have commercials every 7 minutes or so.
And as for ads on the internet, kiss their oss goodbye with JunkBuster (google for it) or Webwasher. I don't look at ads anymore cuz i block 'em out! As for TV, I record most my programs with my capture card, and then edit out the commercials. One day, I hope to have an adapter to my TV that allows me to block out all commericials. Product placements? So what if Seinfeld DRINKs PEPSI, i can ignore those.
;)
I really don't think the most important issue here is them using a proprietary client to spam their users, it's that they are flat out lying to every person who uses this network. This garbage about requiring this proprietary client to prevent flood attacks and "maintaining a clean, safe, well-lit environment" and such is just a pretty looking excuse to place ads on people's screens.
As any 15 year old (no offense) with some network experience can tell you, the concept of trusting some proprietary software on the client side to provide security is uttery foolish. The protocol can be reverse engineered, the application can be reverse engineered. When people download this program, they can do anything they like with it. It would probably not be too difficult to analyze the network traffic the program emits, reverse-engineer the protocol and find out how it differs from IRC.
So either their entire technical staff is comprised of chimpanzees, or this statement about needing a proprietary client for security reasons is a complete lie and a very deceptive way of spamming their users.
I can accept that they might need to raise some revenue, and they chose to do that by requiring proprietary clients, but lying to everyone to make this look more user-beneficial, I cannot.
they're changing the way the servers authenticate. You won't be allowed on period not even to be ctcp'd.
You're so wrong....
WebTV can't run pirch.
Talk City is not owned by NBC.
As a host as well.........
There are MANY MANY users that do this. Probably hundreds since TC has started 4 years ago.
well Talk City does beat out geocities, yahoo, n many others on average minutes per day and in usage n stuff.
They also have over 2 million registered users.
You are so right =)
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
(hehe yeah, welll I've had the account a lot longer then I've been posting here, I didn't really start posting at all until browserwatch chat got nailed by y2k)
.com company that makes a profit?
Well ok... most of the other irc networks servers are either donated or sponsored by somebody. For years, AMUG ran one of the Undernet servers, they were the ones who had to get the money for it (it was the phoenix server, which ruled until it went down recently). Psi.net runs an Efnet server, when its up at least. I believe AOL has an undernet server (they used to run washington, I believe they still do). Most of the servers are like that.
In the case of talkcity, its their own network, they own the whole thing themselves, and the ads are a means to try and make money off it.
Of course its not going to work,but hey, who wants to actually have a
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
AFAIK, Microsoft Exchange Server is not Open Source.
-Mith
man tcpdump ;)
Enjoy your world. I'll enjoy mine.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I often wonder about policies like this, do the people who draft them realise they're excluding everyone who's not using MS of Macs? Or is it just some "majority market" rubbish. The @Home network in Australia is only provifing access to "Windows or Macintosh Users". Anyways, if you want to let these particular people know, email them at egainfeedback@corp.talkcity.com and let them know you exist.
:wq
I really don't see what the big deal is. (enough to be posted on /.)
I am assuming that they run their own ircd; which means they lose some users. (they don't have that big of a userbase to begin with anyways; max users in a channel that I saw was 35)
Solution: Just connect to your local EFnet, IRCnet, or undernet server (with your favorite client) and find a channel that interests you or start your own!
Dorao
PS TC Pirch is supposed to prohibit malicious activity? *bah* If the script kiddie can get the other user's IP, they are still going to flood. (seems like a poor excuse to get more add revenue; which I really don't have that much of a problem with because I am not going to use their services)
Hmm... as i read that, I kinda see what you're saying, but I had an argument with myself. Although doing that would seem like kiddie-shit, it could be a good way to get a point across to them that their proprietary crap will get them into trouble. On the other hand, if you're a good coder, it'd be more useful to go and do something GOOD with your skills, like take a look at xchat or BitchX or fix my c++ compiling :)
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
it makes me laugh when companies shoot themselves in the foot like this. not only is it about supporting all of the operating systems, but I think that you lose a lot of "flavors" of people when you do this as well, and when some leave, it could carry an even greater migration along with it. Not a wise idea to shut anyone out, unless you want to be a loser.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Furthermore, if everyone is using the same 2 or 3 closed-source clients, what if there is a security bug found in one of them? EVERYONE is vulnerable. Competition is good, proprietary is bad. Talkcity will see.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Actually, I think that idea of long distance with ads was really kicked around. i think it's a GREAT idea - if people are willing to listen to ads to get free long distance, all the power too everyone! I personally woulnd't do it (i'd rather do some online long distance), but if you don't like the advertising at all, then don't go there. Don't do the long distance, don't use talk city, etc... no one is putting a gun to your back.
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Rick,
I read all of the messages you posted (found through your user info,) and the page that you linked, and I want to thank you for responding and state that I do believe you are sincere. However, I must point out that, sincere or not, this move will simply not do what it is designed to do. Client side security simply does not work - any script kiddy with the motivation can and will break it in short order.
Talk City is a private organization, and has every right to do this, as you effectively point out. I question not their right, but their reasoning. The client requirement can not accomplish the goal of eliminating the disruptive minority except on a very short term. At the same time, it conflicts with the other professed goals of TC - you don't build a community by locking out a large portion of the community, however good the motivation. The mac version may be in the works, but in the meantime the mac users (and other of the TC communities from what I have heard as well) are finding new homes on EFnet. Once they are gone they may not come back.
I am afraid this signals the beginning of the end for TC chat. If TC determines to pursue security through blessed clients - an inherently broken approach - then it is likely that they will soon determine that security is impossible. I have no iron in this fire, if you had not posted and impressed me as a reasonable and sincere person I would probably think this is a good thing, as an exemplar I'll be able to point to the next time a client asks me to implement similar measures. However you have impressed me, and convinced me that TC is a basically decent organisation that offers a service of value to many people, and thus this situation strikes me as very sad. In the end though, I fear the outcome is still a foregone conclusion - client side security does not work, and the management appears to have vetoed the server side approach, so there you have it.
Very sad, and I do hope time proves my analysis wrong, though I sincerely doubt it will.
Regards,
Arker
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's nonsense. Not the part about a small percentage of people flooding and abusing. That part, I am sure, is true. But this is not only not the only way to fix that - it is not any sort of way to fix it.
Do you really suppose that other irc servers haven't faced the same problem?
This is just an excuse to force folks to watch there ads, sad thing is much of their clientelle is probably clueless enough to buy the excuse.
That said, this move is likely to buy them more of the problems, not less. It will be days, if even that, before l337 $cr1p7 k1dd132 around the world break their security protocol and the serious abuses begin. Security through obscurity doesn't work, I have a feeling talk city and their customers are about to find that out the hard way.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Its difficult to compare ads on the net to ads on TV. When surfing the net, my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing the web page and force me to view adds, like the regular commercial breaks on TV.
Akkkk! Don't give marketing people any ideas, it would be like Vigor all over again, only worse!
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
Of course, this idea falls apart a bit when you consider that their IRCd is actually Open Source (GPL), unless they made it from scratch, which is unlikely.
Just because it's GPL'd doesn't mandate the release of changes if they don't distribute a modified version, which shouldn't be a problem, seeing that it is, after all, a server.
What are you talking about? You can't be circumventing intellectual property protection unless there's intellectual property to be protected in the first place. Talk City doesn't hold copyright on the text of the chats taking place.
I'm a former reg on thier #computer* forum, on 4/12 it's definatly going to be a ghost town or kiddee chat (it's well on it's way there now). Nearly all of the regs have found another home on various IRC servers because either they can't use the other clients, they won't use the other clients (I've tried, perfectly understandable), or noone they want to chat with is gonna use the other clients. I've been chatting there for a couple years now and it's almost like watching your home burn down. At least we've already built and christened a new home.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
For transactions in the other direction (server->client requests), have a firewall log the connection.
I think it could be reverse engineered in a day, and coded into another IRC client in a few hours.
I consider it a challenge. Cursed be Talk City.
-Reeves
IIRC, some company in Sweden did something similar to this; had you listen to a 20-30 second advertisement before connecting you, then the call was free. Don't recall all the details, though. :-)
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
Just so you are aware. irc.linux.com is connected to, and affiliated with, irc.openprojects.net, but is just one server---there are a number of additional ones. On the other hand, linux.com's server handles more clients than most, and it's accessible through a Java chat client on the linux.com web site, so you might find that handy.
Thanks,
Rob Levin
Head of Operations, Open Projects
"Open source, open technology, open information"
So what's all the hullaballoo about this? There are a jillion other IRC networks that are better administered. The planet isn't going to stop rotating because they've decided to become AOL-like. Point being - you can't shut up free speech, and closing yourself off from the rest of the 'Net ultimately will result in the Death Of Your Online Community Via Entrophy. Black Dog
Scott A. Carson
Wait until your ISP requires you to download their proprietary Windows-2000-only web browser with filtering in order to provide a "clean, safe, well-lit environment". Maybe then you'll appreciate that people don't like having to jump through hoops to exchange information on the internet.
I know the analogy isn't exact, but it's similar to what I understand is what is going on here.
BTW: Talkcity is owned by NBC.
. at my signal -- unleash hell .
TalkCity caters mainly to WebTV users. WebTV, coincidentally, also supports Pirch as an IRC client. WebTV is owned by Microsoft. Talkcity is owned by NBC. Microsoft and NBC have exclusive media agreements (MSNBC).
. at my signal -- unleash hell .
The sooner the better, this ridiculous mess is beginning to annoy...
Salocin.com
woo hoo.
i'm all about talking to people in real life.
about all i use IRC for is to download "demos" for games. sorry, i don't know where those " " 's came from. but hurray for real life.
-dennis the kid
How dare you say anything against Talk City?! Their polls are so interesting!
.sig
Topic: What is the best area of the country to raise a family?
o West coast
o Midwest
o South
o East coast
| Vote now! |
8-P
phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
We don't have to sell our brains for basic services. Or for pretty much any service, at that. There is a huge abundance on IRC networks.
People talk a lot about the corporatization of the Internet. While this is obviously true, the beauty of the Internet is that there has been and will continue to be space for the both of us. Weblogs aren't going anywhere. Usenet is still here (I won't go out on a limb and say it will be around forever though.)
What's so great about the Internet is that it doesn't cost 100,000$ to setup shop. Anyone can setup an irc.d, or a web server. Until the cost to do business skyrockets (Which it wont - it will continue to get cheaper and cheaper) the web will never become one big corporate monster.
signature smigmature
- James
Why, I and my brother use DalNet all the time, it's the best place for exchanging culture such as videos, movies software etc!
You can't handle the truth.
"Talk City is dedicated to maintaining a clean, safe, well-lit environment, in which everyone feels welcome and respected." - There you go, they respect all of you.
...
"So here's what we're doing:
On April 12, 2000, Talk City will start limiting our support of IRC clients to a specially programmed IRC client called TC Pirch."
"We encourage all current IRC users to make the switch to TC Pirch (or to our browser-based client, EZ Talk 3) as soon as possible."
And then again, they respect all of you.
Thank you, thank you very much!
You can't handle the truth.
Timothy, that's pretty good. You should be a correspondent to this site. (News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.)
You can't handle the truth.
That the average Talk City luser is not tech savvy is an understatement. The computer forum provided a big pull for Talk City even if they didn't see it generating a lot of revenue: The average luser could join a computer room and ask questions, and usually get an answer. Now that all the knowledgeable people are leaving, they will be stuck with a big vacuum. They will miss us, we were their free tech support and Q&A people. Oh how fun to see the company I used to work for on /. for being stupid. I honestly didn't think it would ever get *this* bad!
Come on down. We have sweet services and we never close!!!!! No stupid restrictions either.
Woooaaaaaa! I thought you said you were a female?!?!?! Sorry I ain't into that!!!!
Woooaaaaaa! I thought you said you were a female?!?!?! Sorry I ain't into that!!!!
The ads on the free l-d are every minute (it's true)
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
A company here in Germany tried free distance calls with commercial breaks - they died within a few months...
I guess there are still some kinds of advertisement that are just too annoying.
subSolar
Note I've not read the article and never heard of the service. It's just as easy to go elsewhere, and if they are going to stop people from using their service, well.. they're going to lose that audience then. Advertisers might notice that....
Honestly though, a service not many people have heard of (judging by the comments I've read so far), and easily duplicable by whatever IRC nets already out there.. why was this newsworthy? Oh, you mean cause they excluded linux? Heavens no!!! It can't be!!! Seems to me if you're using linux you're more inclined to use straight IRC anyway...
Continuing on the communications security/theory theme of the evening, and leaving behind the flame "crisis" (not quite a war, but ultimatums issued) over (OT) Cultural Property, how precisely are they going to accomplish this? Anyone know?
He who fights and runs away,
Everyone should leave TC for matureing networks like Efnet, DALnet, or Astrolink. TC's attempt at controlling which client thier users can use is a blatent attempt at free advertising, and a chance for 3rd party advertisers to put some plugs in for themselves. Xchat baby! ps, I mentioned Astrolink because its small, and has a lot of friendly users (plus Im an oper there ;)
Systems Administrator
Servu Networks
http://www.servuhome.net
Brent Jones
Well, your computer would have to be dirt cheap, and the internet service would be a substancial dent in your cash flow, but I could live with that. I want Cuba, but without that whole "political opression" thing.
Not sneaky? Come on, half the news sites out there are owned by some megacorp or another. I mean, how many people are getting unbiased news from MSNBC? That's about the same subtle warping as product placement.
I would like to point out that, while you're on that topic, I'm all for banning cars. Talkcity for President... wait, no, they're evil...... Damn, I've gotten myself messed up again, but I'm gonna post this anyways.
Your ISP pays another local company for the T1/T3 lines that hook up to an internet backbone(ATT,MCI, etc). I'll call this other local company COX. This can cost from $700-1000 month for a singe T1 to thousands a month for a T3/DS3/OCx etc etc. Mosts ISP have more than a singe T1.
Your ISP also has to pay for the Usenet newsfeed from COX.(the ISP's news server gets articles from COX and you get the articles from your ISP) Or they might go to a different news provider like CAIS. Most ISP's do this because usenet is a beast that will destroy a server in a heartbeat.
IRC is free as far as I know. Your ISP can set up it's own IRC server but it doesnt cost anything to hook up up to the rest of the world(unlike Usenet).
Email is free. Almost anyone with an IP and PC can set up a mail server.
(BTW, COX is the backbone provider where I live(VA) Your's will probaly be different) D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
'Sir, there's a kid with a flood script on the IRC server. I suggest we block out 98% of the net from our server by switching to a proprietary client.'
4 days later...
'ummm, sir, someone hacked the proprietary client, I suggest we limit users to friends and family.'
2 days later ...
' ummm sir...'
and so on, and so on...
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
Talk City adds value (or would claim they did) with unique chat rooms, moderated chat rooms, or rooms that are in some way higher quality. Allowing ANY IRC client to connect will:
- make their system overrun with bots
- expose their users to spammers (if your talkcity "handle" is also your talkcity email, then someone could put a bot in the room that gathers user names and sends out email. AOL has been compromised this way. If you were to appear in an AOL chat room, your mailbox will almost instantly receive spam.
A couple of years ago, I implemented chat for a major internet company and we intentionally didn't use the standard IRC protocol to prevent these problems.'
Of course, online chat is one of the most pathological and unhealty activities a person could be engaged in. It's like taking your time and flushing it down the toilet. I think that Slashdot readers would have better ways to spend their time!
--- Speaking only for myself,
Good one.
-marcia
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." (A. A. Milne)
They say they're doing this to stop abusers with auto-scripts etc. But flat out, anyone can tell you the engineering effort to develop and support a proprietary client is far more than the effort to modify their servers to detect/block abuses.
I agree.. I too am done with TalkCity. Their censoring of words, topics, and now this ban of non-approved IRC clients has finally driven me over the edge. The question is where do we move to? Unfortunately, the channel I run attracts a lot of newbies who can only handle something browser/Java based. When I looked around last time, there was no free Java IRC client, so that say I could switch to UnderNet and just run a new channel there. Does anyone have a pointer towards a free Java IRC client applet that I can embed in my web page?
You can always goto slashnet (http://www.slashnet.org)
----- Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
it's not even that ad thing that pisses me off it's the "we wanna keep an eye on you so you don't piss us off" excuse. we wanna moderate your life. we wanna tell you what you can and cannot say. it seems that when the internet gets bigger and bigger everything becomes even more subject to scrutiny and censors. just leave people alone you limp dick bastards. don't let other peoples lives have such a huge impact on yours, make your own life have its own impact.
No sig for you!!
Talk City isn't related or linked to EFNet in any way, so there's no link to cut.
-- Always borrow money from a pessimist; they don't expect to be paid back.
I know that a lot of pc and mack users look down on webtv users, and hey that is ok, we all get what we can pay for... What makes me mad about what Talk City is trying to do is taking away ower freedom of choice, and that is wrong eny way you slice it....
no, there are major flooding problems. Bad-Seed is one, he would flood #computer-talk for 6-8 hours at a time, if someone called him a name (ie, Bad-Breath, Bird-Seed)
dreemkill.
Actually, Anonymous Coward, I doubt that anyone else does. At least, not anyone who understands the way business works.
Think about this for a second. Following your rationale, angry IRC users who don't want to use clients that show ads are going to be deserting Talk City in droves.
This will result in reduced chat minutes, and less traffic on TC's servers. Okay... so if this logic is sound, the number of chat minutes per day will go down, which means less bandwidth will be used to serve those chat minutes... which means TC's bandwidth costs will also go down.
The chat minutes lost will be those that were previously used by IRC chatters who weren't seeing any ads anyway, correct? So since those chatters already weren't seeing any ads, TC wasn't getting any revenue from those chat minutes anyway, correct?
Hmm. Let's see here. According to this theory, chat minutes used will go down, which means costs will go down, while revenue will stay where it already is. Hmm. And this will anger the stockholders because...??
Think this through a little farther, Mr. Coward. Disruption and harassment of the majority of regular users will go down. Costs for bandwidth used by a minority of users that don't generate revenue will go down. Expenses involved to dealing with the disruptions will also go down.
Net revenues will actually improve. Shared user experience will improve. Talk City's overall expense-to-income ratio will improve. You know, it seems to me that this is usually is the kind of thing that shareholders and investors and partners *like* to hear...
There are an awful lot of misconceptions and erroneous assumptions floating around the Net about this particular issue, Anonymous, and posts like yours indicate that more accurate information is needed here.
While I don't want to clutter up this thread with longer and more detailed explanations of the various issues involved, I did take the liberty of putting them up on a Web page that you might want to take a few minutes to look at:
http://home.talkcity.com/migrationpath/rixter_irc
cheers,
Rick Albertson
Talk City, Inc.
You know, Anonymous Coward, I still do work at Talk City. So I'm sure you'll want to factor that in when I tell you that yes, of course ad revenues on the consumer site matter to the company -- but no, they matter less and less these day as TC keeps gropwing its B2B services market.
Of course consumer ad revenue matters. It would be disingenuous of me to say otherwise. But, honestly, that's really not the driving factor behind this change in policy.
Free speech may be a basic right, but free chat is something else again. Servers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Providing a world-wide network of hosts and moderators costs money. Maintaining a 24/7 TCHelp system costs money. Maintaining a 24/7Network Operations Center and operating some 140 servers at a time costs *lots* of money.
Spending lots of money to provide wide-open access that is regularly being abused by a small subset of users is not good business. And TC is, after all, a business. It's not a DALnet or an EFnet. It's not subsidized by a government or a university or a charitable foundation. It doesn't have the luxury of running a complex online service at a loss, or of making decisions without having to account for the economics involved.
It costs Talk City several million dollars each and every month to provide the online community with its various consumer services... and the company has never charged any of its users one thin dime for doing so. Running advertisements is one of the ways that TC pays for everything it's been giving away to the users for free. So it would be absurd for me to claim that nobody here cares whether you ever see ads or not.
However, it's also absurd to insist that the only reason for this change in policy is to force the users to look at ads while they chat. Frankly, if that was the actual rationale, TC would have made this move a long time ago. It's not a matter of increasing ad counts by brute force by shutting out text-only IRC clients. In fact, the existing revenue generated users who do see ads on the site and in chat is already on target for this year.
So it wouldn't make economic sense to change the existing setup just to make more users see more ads. In fact, due to the inevitable upset in the user community, there would be good reasons *not* to. Closing down access from straight IRC clients clearly will not earn the company more money in the long run, and especially not in the short run.
I don't want to clutter up the Slashdot space with longer and more detailed explanations of all the various issues here... but if you want to know more background information from this particular TC worker's insider point of view, you can check out the URL listed there below my nick to see what else I know about the actual facts and reasoning involved.
cheers,
Rick Albertson
Talk City, Inc.
Arker, Talk City is neither stupid nor lying about the reasons for this change. I will grant you, though, that there's been a lot of miscommunication and misinformation flying around the Internet that could have been addressed more aggressively during the last week. That's why I'm posting this reply.
Remember, TC isn't just a raw network of IRC servers. It's a complex collection of online services, both consumer and B2B oriented, and so there are lots of interrelated issues involved. Solutions to the script-kiddie and hacking problems that might be appropriate for something like a DALnet or an EFnet might not be applicable to a company like Talk City.
Of course, there always are certain things involved in situations like this that employees are not necessarily at liberty to discuss. And I am, after all, a Talk City employee. I make no bones about that -- that's why I'm posting as myself, not as yet another Anonymous Coward. But my main area of focus is on home pages, not chat. My problem users are different than the chat hosts' problem users. It's mighty hard to flood a home page or hex a URL. So I suppose I have it relatively easy in my department compared to the CommOps folks.
Still, while I wasn't directly involved in making the decision to stop allowing open IRC access to TC's servers, and I honestly regret the necessity of it... I do see why the company finally had to make that choice. TC really is a community site, not an unmoderated network of random chat servers. TC really does put a lot of emphasis on its stated purpose of providing a "clean, well-lighted space on the Internet". People who come here really should be able to feel that this is one place where they can congregate without being hassled, hit on, hated, hacked, or harassed.
So there's a lot more going on here than the widespread misconception that Talk City's just trying to force IRC users to see ads while chatting. I've touched on some of the points in other replies to this topic today, and I don't want to text-spam the Slashdot community by going into it all chapter and verse in this thread. But if you want to know more about what this particular employee knows and thinks about this controversial subject, I did put a longer and more detailed explanation of the facts and reasoning behind it up on the Web. The URL's listed right up there below my nick.
cheers,
Rick Albertson
Talk City, Inc.
Sorry, Mr. Coward, but TC's stock price has nothing whatsoever to do with this decision. And neither does 'forcing anyone to use their special client'. It is a business decision, yes, but you've got the logic a little bit turned around here.
Talk City is a business. It's not a DALnet or an EFnet. It's not subsidized by a government or a university or a charitable foundation. It doesn't have the luxury of running a complex online service at a loss, or of making decisions without having to account for the economics involved.
It costs Talk City several million dollars each and every month to provide the online community with its various consumer services... and the company has never charged any of its users one thin dime for doing so. Running advertisements is one of the ways that TC pays for everything it's been giving away to the users for free. So it would be absurd for me to claim that nobody here cares whether anyone ever sees ads or not.
However, it's also absurd to insist that the only reason for this change in policy is to force more users to look at ads while they chat. Frankly, if that was the actual rationale, TC could have made this move a long time ago. It's not a matter of increasing ad counts by brute force by shutting out text-only IRC clients. In fact, the existing revenue generated by users who do see ads on the site and in chat is already well within plan for this year.
So it wouldn't make economic sense to change the existing setup now just to make more users see more ads. In fact, due to the inevitable upset in the user community, there would be good reasons *not* to. Closing down access from straight IRC clients clearly will not earn the company more money in the long run, and especially not in the short run.
In any event, there's a lot more that I cansay about the facts and reasoning behind this this controversial decision, but I'm not going to clutter up the thread by trying to say it all here at once. If you'd like to read more, I've put a longer explanation up on the Web -- feel free to visit the URL listed up there below my nick.
cheers,
Rick Albertson
Talk City, Inc.
It has been *very* interesting following this discussion for the past week or so, you know. There's been some really well-thought-out discourse here. (And, of course, there's been that couple of hundred other posts, too...)
t icle1.htmpl>.
You'll notice that I've posted several replies to some of the more recent posts in this thread, using a Talk City CCC nick rather than the ubiquitous Anonymous Coward nom du tron. I've also included a link to a home page on TC where I've written a longer explanation of the facts and logic behind these IRC-access changes.
That decision isn't something that was done arbitrarily, nor without a lot of extended discussion on the corporate level. But it *is* something that has stirred up a lot of controversy in the online community.
There's been a lot of anger, a lot of support, and especially a lot of misinformation being spread around the chat rooms and the rest of the Web about this change. Inaccurate speculation and erroneous assumptions were making the rounds of the Internet within minutes of the announcement. That's why I think it's important for those of us who know more instead of less about this particular issue to make our voices heard in response. And that's why I'm posting here about it now.
Most of the people doing most of the talking seem to believe that nobody at Talk City is listening. That is very definitely not the case here. I can assure you that TC has been following the various threads about this in the discussion boards, and in the chat rooms, here on Slashdot, and on the alt.online newsgroups, etc. The company is well aware of what our users (and also those who are not our users) have been saying about this change. And believe me, the online hosts and the TC community staff are all very aware of what everyone's been saying about it, too.
A few of you may recognize my CCC nick, but I expect that even fewer of you know who I actually am. I'm Rick Albertson, and I'm the Homes Pages Producer for Talk City. However, I'm not just being a company mouthpiece when I post to these threads. I'm speaking as a concerned and informed individual, not as an employee parroting a party line. What I'm saying here is my own opinion, based on my own beliefs, and not an official pronouncement from the company itself. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints about anything you read in my posts, please feel free to email them directly to me.
And I'm not just saying what I say here because I work for Talk City - trust me on that one, because with the job market as tight as it is in Silicon Valley, I wouldn't have to work here if I didn't want to. But I do want to. I like the people I work with, I like the people I work for, and I think we generally do what we do better than most anybody else does.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I know you have your own ideas and opinions about all of this. And that's why I encourage you to make your own voices heard where it really counts. Here are some places where you can go to learn more about the details, and to tell Talk City what you think about them:
To read Talk City's current FAQs and information about this IRC change, go to
<http://www.talkcity.com/irc>.
To send your feedback to Talk City's corporate staff about this IRC change, go to
<http://www.talkcity.com/help/egain>.
To read and post to the Talk City discussion boards about this IRC change, go to
<http://boards.talkcity.com> and open the Community News folder.
To read an excellent article discussing growth and change on the Internet in the context of this
IRC change, go to <http://www.talkcity.com/communities/computing_ar
To chat with Talk City's community producers and CommOps staff about this IRC change, log
in to #TalkCityChanges on chat.talkcity.com. The room should be open from 4-5 am, 9-11 am, and
5-8 pm Pacific time every day during the changeover period.
cheers,
Rick Albertson
Talk City, Inc.
to just script your normal client with a phony version reply
NICK xxxx-guest :EZ Talk Guest :\001VERSION EZTalk 3.0:20000331:Talk City:Linux\001
USER xxxx-guest 10.0.100.121 daisy.talkcity.com
(server MOTD here)
IRCX
(more MOTD)
(version request from server bot)
NOTICE TrackAllUsers
PING ezt3
(client joins channels, etc.)
I assume the "PING ezt3" does the trick (ezt3 = "EZTalk 3", the java client). Or maybe the "USER" line. Anyone with a sniffer should be able to figure it out (somebody on a Windows box should post a dump of the Pirch client).
...safely shut down and do nothing, right after enough of the stock is sold before the shit hit the fan. Who cares -- it's not like some feeble IRC network really was supposed to become profitable.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's not like this is going to affect that many people. You figure only the more technically savvy users would bother to use a downloadable client anyway, and what's the chance they're on this system anyway? Isn't that the whole concept of plugins/java, that most people aren't knowledgeable enough to download something manually liek this?
Seems like people getting worked up over nothing. It's not like TC have to provide any IRC access at all. That's their choice, and to bitch about it isn't going to get you anywhere.
In general, you cannot fix security problems by trying to make people use a particular client. People trying to bring down the servers can easily learn how to pretend to be the new 'secure' client.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Seriously, the Internet will happily cope with whatever services your wish to invent and implement. If you only use stuff that other people write then you have to accept what they want to do.
I jump from free service to free service, I use free software, I don't code a damn thing, so I find it hard to get worked up when someone changes something on me - I simply move on. (In fact, that's what I've been doing quite a bit lately with changes to both i-drive and GeoCities "GeoPoints" system screwing over both my primary and secondary web sites...)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Then they can sell subscriptions. If one business model doesn't work, who should we blame, the customers who don't like it, or the company? I say we hold companies accountable for lame business ideas. If nobody is willing to watch ads, they lose customers. Big deal.
Actually, a subscription model, where you look at ads and answer questions based about them, and no money is required, is probably a good idea. That lets them get ad revenue without requiring special clients.
I for one will never use a special browser/irc client just to help a company collect banner revenue.
It's like tv, only on tv you only have to see an add every 15 minutes or so -- a respectable amount of time (if you ignore the product placements,that is...)
Its difficult to compare ads on the net to ads on TV. When surfing the net, my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing the web page and force me to view adds, like the regular commercial breaks on TV. Also, banner ads are not subliminal, like product placements. Consumers know where the ads are and are free to ignore them much easier than on TV.
This seems to be a non-issue to me.
Just move to a better irc network, and when you do, notice that EFNet is the largest, longest running IRC network in existance. Sounds like as good a place as any, huh?
-- iCEBaLM
No, there is a client (Hell, two even!) available for the Mac
from TC. They have the ever-so-lovely EZTalk3 Java
client, complete with gif'ed emoticons, as well as
the CGI driven EZTalk Web.
Man is servant to curiosity and prisoner to knowledge. -Me
I am currently a host on Talk CIty, and I have many friends that are also. The main reason for the new version comming out is that there has been a user comming into the rooms for the last month that floods the room with joins/parts, and also leaved REALLY bad messages when he kicks himself from the room. This goes on for hours almost every day.
As for the other things such as adds and stuff, those are just things that TC did to earn more money. They need more revenue due to a major re-vamping of their company. Recently they opened up at least a hundred paying jobs (all slots filled now).
TC has made some very bad decisions on their part about not allowing Linux users, but hey, they do own it, so I really can't complain.
For all the Mac people who got displaced by Talkcity (used to be eWorld, sort of), there's a new channel at #mactalk on the open project network. (irc.linux.com)
There is no client available for the Mac from TC. It is Win32 only.
I'll play devil's advocate.
If they provided a Linux binary, people would scream bloody murder, because of the afflicted dozens and dozens of Linux Alpha users.
The alternative? Naturally it would be OSS.
In 48 hours *MAX*, a version that would work sans ads would be out, defeating the entire point.
I don't think it is incredibly asinine to expect companies to be able not to bleed cash to provide us services. I use JunkBuster because banner ads servers are uniformly slow, but the ads on AOL IM don't bother me as they don't slow down access, and ultimately take up a tiny chunk of my 1280x1024 desktop. Of course, I couldn't use "AOL 5.0 50 free hours" if I wanted to due to my running Win2k, but anyhow....
There has yet to been a really great OSS solution that works for all platforms, and yet allows companies to ensure certain requirements, be they displaying ads or cheat free Quake clients. This topic has come up on SlashDot before, but checksum'd clients and other solutions haven't appeared to work.
matt
(hey fellow former browserwatch chat regular, how ya been? :-) )
:)
Well, no, your $20 a month doesn't pay for all that other stuff, it pays for your isp. Of course I'm pretty sure you already know that, and that it was just a rhetorical question.
The problem with what talkcity is doing is that they're effectively using a scapegoat to make more money. I mean really, look at the announcement. wanting to create a clean enviroment and all that nonsense, I mean really... just look at how well client side security works... I mean we have such great examples as ICQ, which has no real security at all when you get right down to it.
Its the same problem here, of course that press release is aimed at people who aren't going to have any clue about this sort of thing and will believe it, rather then the real reason, which is that they want to make more money.
I bet if they said that, then the people around here would be a lot less annoyed. Of course an honest corporation is something that we'll probably never see, basically lying is pretty much standard business these days.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
If Nike quit paying Mike and Tiger thier millions, how many shoes do you think they'd be selling in a couple of years?
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Then there's the other problem people keep forgetting: Ads don't actually make money. Say we have company A and company B. Company A product A, company B has product B. Company A decides to make product A free, and works by sellign advertising space on product A to company B. Company B, seeing how much money A is getting from them, follows suit and releases product B for free. Now company A and B have no revenue except from each other. No money is being made, so they have to start charging for their products again. The end result: We're back at square one, only now products A and B are covered in adverts. The consumer gets screwed. In fact, the products now cost more money, 'cause both of them have to pay graphic designers to make the adds, coders to incorporate them, and a host of other additions to infrastructure.
I know this scenario is prepostrous, but its the simplest way to illustrate the primary fact: advertisements do not make money. In fact, they are costing someone (someone very stupid) money. One cannot simply wish that everything was free but with advertisements, because there is still actual revenue being produced.
Then throw in the stock market. Companies that release products for free through selling advertising space, while simultaneously buying advertising space from other companies, are somehow making money. Their stock is rising. Where's that money coming from? Nowhere. Its effectively counterfitting. Money from nothing. This forwards inflation. People have called the modern stock market a massive pyramid scheme. This is a falsehood, as in a pyramid scheme, the last people to sign on get screwed. In the stock market, the people who didn't invest at all, and suffer losses due to inflation, get screwed. That's worse then a pyramid scheme.
The advertising economy isn't working. The system is vulnerable to abuse.
No, see the problem is that as the ads proliferate, sellers of 'free' services think that the quality of their product can go into the shitpot. Thus, as everyone can see by my email address, I am reduced to doing my own techsupport for my ISP connection, because all they give a shit about is whether or not I can read the ads.
A 'free' long distance service like you mention sounds like an abomination to me.
And it's not just free stuff. Go to a movie theatre. Pay $8 a ticket. Get bombarded by ads. Wait a minute! Who paid for the ticket? Did you pay for the ads too?
And as the frequency of ads increases, your actual 'voice' as a consumer drops to nothing. You can't avoid the ad economy. It's everywhere. The ads you can't skip in DVD's are just another example. You do pay for them, don't you? Why should you pay to be advertised at?
And the more money the ads bring in, the less the 'cost' to the consumer matters, and the less the service providers give a shit about your problems.
I leave you with the product of my imagination. This is trying to have a private conversation with someone via an 'advertised' long distance service:
Marsha: "Oh, John"
John: "Marsha"
Marsha: "John"
John: "Marsha, I want to tell you some -"
NOW AT SUPER AUTO STORE, NO MONEY DOWN SAVE SAVE SAVE SAVE SAVE GET YOUR CARS FAST THESE CARS HAVE TO GO SAVE SAVE SAVE
Marsha: "John?"
Many of the flooders abuse open wingates to get around the (ineffective, one-IP only) bans that TalkCity uses, and they could add a check to their proxies to scan for an open wingate, as many other networks have done. If they go to the trouble to try and prevent real clients from connecting, I do not see why they cannot scan for open wingates.
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
Sure, they could fix the servers to fix these problems but they never will. Making a propeitary client will get them banner advertising, cash, and a "solid" userbase. Sure, this may be an easier way to support, but this is not where Talk City is looking as for doing this .. Once again, we pop back in to the root of all evil .. $$$
Though Talk City knows they are going to lose users from doing this, they also know that the majority of users that they are going to use are the lusers that use stupid scripts and flood stuff on IRC networks. Yes there *are* server side ways to effectively filter this out, but why would they do that? Take advantage of the opportunity, and make a good cover up as to why they must make a dedicated client to connect to their servers.
Pure and simple .. Money folks.
1) Since announcing the closeout, Onno Tijdgat, the author of the Mac irc client ircle, has confirmed he's in discussions with Talk City about making a mac-based client. He has publically stated that ads are NOT part of the discussions of making his irc client 'supported'.
So all the people who claim this is all over ad banners can stick that up their butts.
2) Talk City's network is not like the other major irc networks (DALnet, efnet, etc.) which are distributed across multiple, geographically diverse servers. All Talk City's servers are centrally located. This significantly changes the flooding issues that irc is (in)famous for. There is no significant delay between servers (assuming things are running well ;). This means that clones are a somewhat bigger problem since other networks would have an inherent delay because of their network design. There is no foolproof, effective way of dealing with flooders and clones in this kind of environment. If anyone knows one, I'd like to know (sell it to Talk City ;).
3) Dorao, the channel you were in may have had 35, but that's one channel out of thousands. Talk City limits most rooms to 50 users max so it couldn't have got a lot bigger, anyway. Also, Talk City runs two separate networks so if you connect to chat.talkcity.com you're only seeing half the picture.
Most days, Talk City runs well over 20K concurrent users. Not a DALnet or efnet record, but not too shabby, either.
In either case, comparing them to these networks is not relevant... Talk City isn't irc, they'd prefer the term community... encompassing chat, discussion boards, home pages, etc. They do have more users and higher usage patterns that other similar sites, by which you'd have to consider Yahoo chat, Excite Chat, Geocities and the like (Sammeh, I seem to recall seeing a notice when they surpassed 3.5 million members).
4) 'raw' irc users make up a small minority of all chat users in Talk City. WebTV, EZTalk (java) and their co-branded Pirch client are used by the majority of users. Talk City is obviously betting/expecting some PC users will switch to EZTalk or TCPirch, and the Mac users will switch to EZTalk or ircle if Onno comes through. Sure, they'll gonna see a hit in numbers, but it's not going to be as big as some people expect.
The hosts who've posted here are clearly working in Talk City's '#Computer' forum where you would expect a higher proportion of computer-savvy users using irc clients.
Even if this were about ads (see point 1 above) the increase in users who switch to add seeing clients isn't going to be that high. I assume Talk City's done its homework on the numbers and thinks it can live with it.
5) Whoever it was who said it's all about scripts is wrong. TCPirch has the ability to run regular pirch scripts (at least, I think it has) and I would expect ircle to be able to do the same. It is true, though, that the majority of disruptions to chat are caused by one or other mIRC or Pirch script that some lameass installed. It's blocking these clients that Talk City is aiming at (and I can hear IRCops on other networks wishing the same). As I understand it, TCPirch has other controls to block war scripts while still allowing the majority of scripts to run.
In short, sure, hard core chatters that want to be able to run their war scripts can do so elsewhere. Talk City's clearly making a business decision based on protecting their core users from the lamers. I don't have a problem with any chat (irc or otherwise) where I don't have to deal with jerks on a regular basis.
Now I'm done. I've already used up my quota of brain cells for today.
-- Always borrow money from a pessimist; they don't expect to be paid back.
I know I pay my ISP every month, and they have to pay the telco for lines for subscribers to dial in on, but who else do they have to pay every month that any other kind of business wouldn't?
:-)
Who pays for IRC? Who gets paid?
Who pays for newsgroups? Who gets paid?
Who pays for all those fat pipes and the electronics that tie it all together and gets the electrons where they're supposed to go? Who gets paid?
Does my "$19.95 a month, all you can eat up to 56K" fully cover the costs of browsing, e-mail, IRC if I ever try it again, ftp, etc., or am I being subsidized somewhere along the line?
Best answer should rake in big karma
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Why do we have to sell our brains to companies to use basic services?
The internet has, is, and will continue to degrade into a corparate wasteland of adds.
It's like tv, only on tv you only have to see an add every 15 minutes or so -- a respectable amount of time (if you ignore the product placements,that is...)
But on the web, Everything (why yes, evem this form I fill out now) has an add on it.
And now IRC? it may just be one network, but the point is that just talking to our friends, something we take fro granted is now just one more way to invade our brains and make us but stuff.
Think abaout it. Whats next... free long distance with a commercial break every 2 minutes?
More Caffeine. NOW
Here's a conundrum, taken from the world of Cable Television:
Network Television: You pay for the shampoo, and the shampoo pays for your T.J.Hooker. Downside: Shampoo ads in the middle of T.J. Hooker.
Ideal Cable Television: You pay for the shampoo, and you pay for T.J.Hooker. Upside: No shampoo ads interrupting your program.
Typical Cable Television: You pay for the shampoo, you pay for the Shatner, and you still get shampoo commercials in the middle of your programs.
Which implementation is the best?
The Point: How do you want to pay for your Internet and World Wide Web? How much service do you want for what you pay? How many of you are perfectly willing to put up with cable bills and commercials in order to get extra spiffy programming? How is this very different for current e-service funding schemes? Discuss.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The thing is that I think there may be a light at the end of the corporate tunnel. We all know that practically every dotcom is running on over-inflated IPO money right now. Some are running out of cash because the busuiness model isn't self-sustaining. No one really knows if you can sell things online and end up with a profit. Every company that sells stuff online is too busy burning cash on acquisitions and expansions.
Wall Street is clued into all of this. Everyone is just waiting for the dotcom bubble to burst and the Federal Reserve is trying to make sure it bursts before it gets out of hand. Just look at the market cap on companies like Yahoo. Its insane. These companies have some very limited intelectual property assets and pretty much no real-world assets. Yahoo has a "portal" (what they call search engines with news services now, apparently) site, some auctions and an ecommerce thingie. All of these are done to death on the web as it is and only one item is even slightly useful (search engine, though I like Altavista more, personally). And they support the bulk of this with ads that no one really reads...Ads that just link to other dotcoms!
When the bubble breaks I think less and 5% of dotcoms will survive. There's too many people offering identical services and not making any kind of money. Lots of sites will just die off, loose their stockholders a ton of cash and make every ligitimate businessman rather disenchanted with the net in general.
I'm sure ads will continue though. Probably not on specific clients (like this IRC thing or CuteFTP-type deals), but places were they are unintrusive and can actually make some money (web sites like this one).
Then we can all get back to what the web is all about: Porn, and lots of it.
Ohh...I'm starting to sound like Katz, time to stop.
is because they are unable to deal with the barrage of attacks on their irc servers from people using scriptable clients. In the explanation that was sent out to hosts, they explain that they are unable to stop the flooding, nick stealing (all TC nicks require passwords), and various war scripts that people are using on the server through these clients. This smells like BS to me, but I am unable to prove it, because I don't know enough about how IRC servers and these attack scripts works. But I chat on other servers, and they never seem to have those kinds of problems. Undernet, DALnet, whatever, I've never seen anywhere near the problems on there that I do on TalkCity.
I suspect these come from a couple of sources. Socially, by proclaiming themselves bigger, better, and cleaner than the rest of IRC, they make themselves a target. Technically, they use these stupid proxy servers that, while protecting a user's privacy, also make it impossible to effectively ban someone; only their superops, the CSAs, can ban someone by host, and then it is server wide. This neuters the hosts they generally use to keep order; on another server, we could ban the guy and be done, but on TalkCity we have to waste the CSA's time to get it done right.
This "solution" doesn't address either of these basic problems. That it doesn't reveals them to be the moneygrubbing rats they are, using the server only to increase their adcounts. They did the same thing a while back, adding message boards (with ads) to the server, that all hosts had to chat on, and telling all the forums and hosts that they had to have regularly updated webpages (with ads). There's nothing wrong with ads on pages; changing the structure of the place to increase adcount, while proclaiming that outside "hacker" forces are making them do this, is wrong. TalkCity is no longer a fun place to host, and that's why I'm done there, and a lot of other people too.
Communication is only possible between equals
Well, as I see it, this is pretty silly. The problems listed on the info page are server-side issues, easily repaired (in fact already repaird on many servers). To quote a luser on TC, "If TalkCity was the government, they'd ban cars to prevent vehicular accidents." The funny part of this client-side, administrative solution is that they've forgotten the golden rule:
Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.
How long before $hacker figures out $black_magic and adds it to the $irc_client_of_choice (isn't source code nice?)?
(BTW, no, it is NOT a simply version request)
</MHO>
-Mith