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.

Comments

Who pays for the Internet and who gets paid?

[unitron]

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 :-)

Another advertising sccheme..

[CokeJunky]

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?

Re:Another advertising scheme..

[susano_otter]

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.

Corporate Wasteland

[Kragma]

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the way the net has sort of become a huge mini-mall. Ads are all over the place now and everyone's trying to sell something.

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.

The reason Talkcity is closing IRC

[DanMcS]

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.

Black Magic

[Kishar]

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