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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.
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.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
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
oh, a java client. how long util someone decompiles it, figures out what to send, and hacks an open source client to join their network? then again, why bother. as people have said, it's just another stupid chat network, who wants a chat network with ads when there are tons of IRC networks without? talkcity who?
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.
I would agree with you if I thought their goal was only to be a catalyst for great discussions, but I believe their actual goal is to make money. This is hard to do without banner adds or at least some control over what the user sees. If they allow any IRC client access, then they have no control.
So, they have done what any good business does; captivate an audience, make a niche, then reap the profits.
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?"
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'm betting on the chimpanzees.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
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