Slashdot Mirror
CNN Says Chat Rooms Are a Haven for Hackers
MiTEG writes "CNN is carrying an article about IRC and how it aids "hackers" with their mischief. There are some alarming quotes from Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Technologies, such as "people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC"." Yeah, if they ever hung out in our chatroom, they'd
lock us all up for abusing Kurt the Pope.
Visitors to the website slashdot.org will by now have surely heard of the act of Moderation. This is where a contributor's post can be 'Moderated' either positively or negatively, depending on how the Moderator perceives the value of the post. There is a sliding scale of total moderation points, from -1 to 5, along with snappy summaries of the reason for moderation, such as "Funny", "Insightful", or the ever popular "Troll". An additional benefit offered to Moderators is the ability to ban a poster from contributing, by negatively moderating enough of his postings in a 24 hour period.
In order to retain some level of fairness for the Slashdot population, the Slashdot Editors (adopting the role of 'Benevolent Dictators') have implemented a scheme whereby regular users of Slashdot, chosen essentially at random, are given the ability to act as Moderators.
This underlines an inherent flaw in the system. Psychological studies have shown that in any community, no matter how small, should a random sampling of people be given the slightest grasp of power, they will immediately abuse it. There is a primal, evolutionary desire in Man to place himself higher than his peers by whatever measurement they can muster. Slashdot Moderation provides the ideal means for which a man can prove himself more equal than others.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law at such an early point in my thesis, I have no choice but to compare Slashdot Moderation to the systematic genocide of the Jewish community in 1930's Germany.
A bold statement, I admit, and deliberately designed to shock, but I feel the statement is necessary. I shall now offer a more rational explanation, as well as a comparison of the parallels between Slashdot Culture, and the National Socialist regime.
First, some history. National Socialism did not spring up overnight. It grew from a feeling of national bitterness and resentment at the war reparations Germany was forced to make after World War One. Germany was a broken country, populated by desperate starving people. And to the desperate, an extreme ideology begins to seem like a rational choice.
The advent of new technology forces a paradigm shift in the way the beholders of that technology think. The Christianity Meme was made wide spread by the invention of the Gutenberg press. And the rise of National Socialism was made popular because of the invention of Cinema. Here we had a new means to control the flow of information to the populace, that they are willing to unquestioningly listen to due to the 'novelty factor' of moving pictures. It is no coincidence that some of the best Cinematography of the early 20th Century came out of the National Socialist propaganda machine.
Why is this the case? It is yet another fault of man that a new means of distributing memes is perceived, due to the 'newness' of the medium, to have a greater 'validity' than older media. Those harnessing new inventions have the power to win control of the hearts and minds of others.
With the tools in place, who should the National Socialists target? Clearly, as a counterpoint to Man's desire to hold power over others, there is also a desire to resent the success of others. If someone is successful, they reduce the self-worth of their beholders. Although times were harsh in Germany in the prelude to World War II, there were still successful inhabitants of that country. Possessing shrewd business acumen as well as the contacts in other countries needed to maintain support in such a poverty stricken and broken land, who else should deserve the wrath of the populace more than the Jews?
Fast-forward to the latter quarter of the 20th Century. Computing technology is focused in niche markets, and limited to big successful companies like IBM and Microsoft. As the markets were limited, there were also limited opportunities for employment. This gave rise to a rising number of college dropouts, seething with resentment and unable to relate to society beyond the staccato clatter of keyboards and the pallid green glow of an 80x24 text display, and lacking the basic business skills (and a smart suit) needed to secure employment at one of these companies.
At this time, a new invention was beginning to take hold in College campuses throughout the world. The Internet. As with the Gutenberg press and Cinema beforehand, this new technology would grow to spread one of the most virulent memes of the modern age - Open Source Software, created as the antithesis of successful business practise.
So, the parallels between the birth of Anti-Semetic National Socialism and the birth of Open Source Software have been made. Of course, it is easy to claim that A=B without providing further logical evidence in support. So, the next task of my thesis is to provide further parallels, and bring this discourse back to the initial focus on Slashdot Moderation.
Slashdot was conceived, in it's original 'Chips 'n' Dips' incarnation, as a vehemently anti-corporate Open Source website. Roughly 10-15 years down the line from the birth of Open Source, it has become saturated with propaganda, and now forms the centrepiece of the Open Source Development Network. An authority in it's field, Slashdot's success is in no small part due to the ability of the editors to 'pick and choose' valid news articles submitted by users, and present the same old tired "Open Source Good / Closed Source Bad" rhetoric time and time again, dabbling with anti-copyright and the right of the 'common man' to remove an artist's ability to gain compensation for the work. In essence, this is similar to the 'paring down' of artistic worth in 1930's Germany. If no-one is willing to contribute valid and vibrant art to the community, then all art shall become harsh and functional, possessing a certain intimidating aesthetic.
Which leads onto Open Source's shining achievement - Linux. This diatribe is not aimed towards Linux in particular, as it is a well-oiled, well-tuned machine. A technically adept Operating System, it is worthy of admiration by any rational man. The point of this thesis is not to attack the art produced by Open Source coders, which in itself is worthy, but to enlighten all as to the political processes behind the OSS movement.
By the same scale, it is hard to fault Mercedes for the technical excellence of the vehicles which were used by the National Socialist party. But the politics behind the party are what taint the image of Mercedes' vehicles of the era. The Swastika itself is a benign symbol, found this day in such diverse locations as Pokemon cards, but is permanently tainted with the history of the acts made under its auspice. In the same way, companies switching to Open Source solutions will begin to regard the Penguin with the same trepidation as their profits fall.
It should be worth noting at this point that IBM, previously one of the world's greatest companies, has begun reporting servere financial losses, no doubt due to its adoption of Open Source practises. This epoch-making event was NOT reported on Slashdot, even though articles were submitted.
And what of the other great company mentioned above? Microsoft, aka Micro$oft, Mickeysoft, Microshaft, Kro$oft, and many other derogatory and undeserved names. Throughout the previous 25 years, Microsoft has grown from strength to strength, again possessing shrewd business acumen as well as providing products that people want. This makes them the number one target for the OSS movement. Incapable of standing by their own merits, the OSS zealot would rather attack Microsoft as a priority than produce anything of worth for their community.
Slashdot Moderators, crazed with their limited new-found power, exhibit this behavior. It is a sad state of affairs that the majority of article moderations are negative. Where is the positive feedback and sense of social contribution? Nowhere to be found. Moderators are too focused on putting their peers down to make themselves appear superior, rather than doing the hard work and becoming better on their own terms.
As the National Socialists required a scapegoat, Slashdot Moderators require a constant stream of Postings to label '-1, Inferior'. Once a posting is reduced to the score of -1, it becomes invisible to the casual user. Again, this is a parallel to the Ghettoization of Germany upon the election of Hitler.
In essence this would not be so bad, were postings to be evaluated on their own terms. However, alongside the moderation of their postings, each user has a 'Karma' value, namely the sum of their worth to the Slashdot community. As a user's posts are moderated up or down, so their Karma fluctuates. As Karma becomes negative, a user's default posting score is reduced, until they are posting at a default of -1. Again, ghettoizing PEOPLE, not just their opinions.
This ghettoization is reinforced with the often fake belief that a negatively moderated post, and therefore the poster, is a "Troll". (Is it any wonder that such a name has been chosen to describe these people, invoking mental imagery of facial disfigurement and hooked noses?) As the Jews were accused of fraud, dishonesty and being subhuman animals, so too are Trolls accused of FUD, Crapflooding, and obfuscated goatse.cx links. Quite often, these 'undesirables' are capable of providing a valid insightful comment on a topic, but because it is in opposition to the Political dogma of Slashdot they are moderated back into their ghetto. The person becomes moderated, not their opinion.
This is just the thin end of the wedge. Although, as memes are transient, it is difficult to silence an opinion, it is trivial to silence a person. Upon the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the populace were motivated by propaganda into entering the Jewish Ghettos en masse with the sole purpose of causing as much damage as possible to Jewish businesses and residences. This parallels far too accurately with the Slashdot Editor's non-discouragement of the act of IP-banning. As mentioned above, this occurs when an individual user's postings are repeatedly moderated down in a short period. They then become incapable of posting any contributions themselves. In essence, they have been silenced, regardless of the worth of their postings.
Of course, the editors claim that Meta-Moderation is the panacea to solve this clear abuse of moderating privledge. But if a Meta Moderator is presented with a list of moderations that they disagree with, such as this targetted 'silencing' mentioned above, they cannot note them as such without in turn becoming an 'Undesirable' themselves, as too many Disagreements with the Moderation groupthink also result in loss of Karma.
Throughout all of this, the Editors have claimed a false level of detachment from the acts of moderation. In a same way, as the National Socialists gathered their power and began working on their Elite Political wing, The SS, they too remained detached from the civilians working in their name. Why? Because after inspiring the populace to such acts of violence through their propaganda, they could then claim that they were only giving the people what they want.
And then began the next stage of the atrocities. The Gestapo, Germany's secret police, were recruited from the best and the brightest of Germany's elite. As is the case now, the best and the brightest of society were often shunned and ostracized in society. In essence, the Gestapo were a tightly controlled 'Geek Army' of intelligent young men with a burning, seething resentment of normal society. The perfect psychological profile for the cause.
After all, give a normal man (with an active sex life) a gun and he will use it responsibly in self defence. Give a geek a gun and he will behave according to his sociopathic logic and hatred of the world he arrogantly presumes to be distant from. Ask yourself why Slashdot flat-out justified the murder of innocents at Columbine. And then ask yourself why, even for a brief moment, you almost began to sympathize with the killers after Jon Katz' manipulative and pseudo-emotive Hellmouth articles.
How this relates to Slashdot is clear. The majority of Slashdot posters are Sociopathic OSS zealots, unable through lack of social finesse or personal hygiene to mate regularly. Sexually and emotionally frustrated and with grudges to bear, incapable in their blinkered sense of self-righteousness of accepting any dissenting opinion than the OSS cause. Now give these people the opportunity to Moderate these dissenting opinions. Of course they are going to want to silence them, by any means necessary.
Now, the Slashdot Editors have admitted taking this silence of opinion into the next stage, by moderating whole swathes of 'undesirable' posts negatively. And then permanently banning anyone who moderates said posts back up from moderating EVER again! The result of this new policy? The few Moderators with any sense of fairness and decency are removed from the moderation pool, leaving the power ENTIRELY in the hands of the zealots. Clearly, positive moderation is discouraged under this regime, which is a direct parallel with the way the National Socialists moved their own sympathisers into positions of power throughout Europe.
So how does this compare to the genocide performed in Auschwitz and their ilk? I would like at this point to explain that in NO way do I wish to belittle the horrors that were performed in the name of National Socialism. The six million innocents killed were a cry of anguish from which humanity may never recover. And a vast distance in time and scope from a few banned posters on some shitty "My Favourite Links - now with comments" website. But these stories need to be retold before the horror is lost forever.
For the only thing that we learn from history is that we never learn anything from history. Time and time again, the St. Vitus dance is played out, we make the same mistakes, and we perpetually fail to see the warning signs.
So, moderators, the next time you moderate a rational, insightful post down, maybe because you disagree with it or because it's posted by a 'Known Troll', just ask yourself this...
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
And fresh reports say that 'hackers' also use e-mail, telephones and postal services. Shut them all down!
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
Why is this news? Of course hackers hang out in IRC. You know what, so do crackers. And so do other people.
NEWSFLASH: The sky is blue.
In this age of watered-down single source media, this article is about par for the course. It's hard to believe that the bulk of American's accept CNN as a reliable media outlet.
ahem (dons flame proof suit)...
in other news...
water wet
microsoft bad
moox. for a new generation.
Criminals that want to organize any criminal actions are known to use the telephone system to communicate!
The Internet is a haven for hackers, Terrorists, and pedofiles... Tom Ridge, Chief of Home land security says we must destroy it NOW. In other news Alcolism is directly reatled to computer use.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
It seems like the credit card thing is a paper tiger bandied about by corporate news sites to inspire fear in people about the internet. I don't know of anyone who has had credit card numbers stolen or traded on the internet. Usually card theft happens when people simply lose their cards(in meatspace).
love is just extroverted narcissism
Well, in the same sense, penises aid rapists, so let's make a law forcing everyone to get castrated!! That makes as much sense as dissing IRC!
Repeal the DMCA!
You know, sometimes, reporters just have to get a grip.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
"It's older, it's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company, it's one of the Internet protocols ... so if you're running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it," says Schneier. "So it's not that it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service and people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC."
In other words, just trust the big companies and none of this would ever happen???
This guy has got to be joking!
Astonishing.
Ah, what fun we had with bots . . . We had a bot to talk to our phone list database, a bot to page people, etc . . . Grand fun.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
IRC! And the telephone! And email! And public meeting places! And printers! And the postal system! They all help those nefarious "hackers" do their evil work!
Jesus Christ on a bicycle. Communication is communication. They talk about IRC being hard to track, but I'm sure that at a cursory glance, most other forms of communication can be, too.
Sensationalism at its best. Take a subject that the common person may not be very familiar with, like IRC, and you can spin it into any kind of world you want.
Don't you think IRC hasn't yet died cos of things like that? Come on, those networks aren't full of "asl chatters". IRC is fun and not because the chat.
- Have anything you've done made your life better?
this just in -- dancefloors, bars, other public settings rumored to be HACKER FREE!
thelocust[dot]org
I guess if you consider Hackers 13+ teenage boys looking for Internet girlfriends hackers...
Sure IRC might help hackers comunicate, but if it didnt exist, im sure ICQ or some other live forum software would take its place.
Its the internet, theres no way your going to stop people comunicating over it.
That comment does make sence. You don't have to pay for it. There are no advertisements like with AIM. You don't get random crap sent to you like with ICQ. But I wasn't aware that not liking unsolicited solicitations made me even more l3et0 than before.
i suspect the quotes from Schnier (sp?) were eitehr taken out of context or he didnt know what they were going toward.
i read the article yesterday (tried submiting it too, rejected) and the article was anti-IRC right from the start. Kinda like Phil Zimmerman's "guilt" over PGP dabacle with the Washington Post last September following the terror attacks.
basic thing to remember: the media is always biased, no matter how much they say they arent.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
...and remember, any time someone says anything, it's a haven for radical ideas. Perhaps we should just cut fingers and vocal cords at birth so nobody can do anything illegal.
Computer security expert Chad Harrington regularly surfs Internet Relay Chat (IRC),
So Mr. Harrington is a hacker himself since he regularly surfs IRC? And who "surfs" IRC anyway?
IRC is a good forum for any groups. Just as mailing lists and newsgroups.
These people that come up with these theories have too much time on their hands.
People who hang out in bars are more likely to be convicted of a DUI. Therefore we should close all bars.
People who own a gun are more likely to shoot someone. Therefore we should ban all stores that sell guns, such as K-Mart.
People who smoke are more likely to die of lung cancer. Therefore we should close down all 7-11s because that's where people sometimes buy cigarettes.
While it may be true that "Many people who are hax0rs use IRC", that in no way indicates that the converse is true. I realize I dont' have to tell you all that, but who else is there. I am sick of so-called "experts" spouting ridiculous notions.
Spend some time on irc.enterthegame.com. It's a server for people who play online games. Shocker, not too much hack talk going on here; just typical clan nonsense, all in good fun.
In my opinion this CNN article is merely FUD material--Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. It's just gloom and doom about those "wild hackers" on that "crazy unregulated Internet".
Even if IRC went away, the net-criminals would find some other way to trade information. Just because some people are trading unlicensed software and credit card information on IRC doesn't mean that EVERYONE on IRC is doing that.
Regardless, I wouldn't be surprised if the Feds were working on a bot that would look for suspicious activity in a particular channel. If I were given their task, that's what I would do.
The Wild west of IRC... BANG BANG! do what does that make IRCops?
erm, I think that's rather pathetic, IRC is just a convieniant communication medium. You don't get people complaining that mobile phones or pagers are aiding criminals?
It's looking like Taco's found a new way to harrass Kurt...
pants
That is what I need for IRC to be shut down! What's next Napster? OH CRAP!! Napster is already gone. What the heck? I have to get a life now or wait any ideas where else I can get a whole bunch of junk for free and be able to hang out, play trivia, and chat with fellas that are just like me?
If they try to shut down IRC, I am gonna have to write a letter to someone, cause I ain'y gonna be happy!
"Entertain the Brutes"
As platform for Spoofs, exploit, originating attacks.
Also, one "Exchange" software has been now and then used to commit major DoS and virii propagation.
As long as we are at this, lets observe the IIS case, for this "software" (sorry for the hacker term) disseminated worldwide by an obscure corporation, is indeed the major host platform for all hackers in the world.
Now we know the way to the first step in eradication Computers security problems !!!
LETS BAN IIS AND ECXHANGE !!!
Yours faithfully
Joe Knobblehead
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
AOL is for Idiots... I love Generalizations
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Oh wait, I'm just some schmuck talking about kernal development. Can that get me arrested too?
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
There is file trading in IRC as well as hacker discussions even discussions on any topic imagineable
samething happens in a bar, doesn't mean we should shut down bars too
Chatrooms, in the news over the past years, have also been a haven for:
People sharing interest in pretty much everything you can find in alt.* and rec.*
Pedophiles
People meeting each other legitimately and socially
Terrorist plots
The future of Slashdot
It's just another red herring for the media, the biggest news for the New Yahk media is a big drought in Delaware, so guess what they dig up to shock Mr. and Mrs. Average American. Big wh00p.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That "journalist" deserves a +5 "funny" or a -1 "watched too many h@x0r m0vi3s"
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
One of the solutions for this problem is webchats. Webchat can be done using http and a web browser, all the functionality becomes controled by web frames inside the browser. No information can be retrieved besides the ones avaiable.
Of course that there are plenty of disadvantages, the speed is one of them, but I think that is acceptable so we can increase security.
Other option is modify IRC protocol to avoid these security flaws, this would avoid speed problems, and maybe is the more intelligent thing to do. But, will new IRC clients/servers implement the new protocol.
IMHO the new protocol, whatever it would be, http or new irc, should not be compatible with the old one, so we enforce the change, and avoid further problems.
What are the other options?
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
It has been determined that schools are a haven for anarchists. We believe this is due to the fact that an unusually large percentage of high school students are anarchists. If we want any safety from these anarchists we must somehow eliminate schools.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I read this article last night - it got posted to efnet.org. Yes, the real "hackers" do hang out on IRC, however, the article is vastly uninformed. I don't take seriously an article that can't understand the concept of a channel. :)
Anonymously stealing, trading personal information
Ok, do this over IRC, and you're a criminal - do it with a website, spyware, or spam, and you're a business.
hmmmm..... maybe I need to check out #amazon and #brilliant.
the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) didn't provide any statements to CNN regarding what goes on in Internet Relay Chat
Gee, I guess it would have been way too much trouble for CNN's hotshot reporters to log on and find out for themselves before running this half-baked article.
"A lot more credit card numbers are stolen than ever used, but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the Net."
You should ALSO assume that your wife is cheating on you. And you're about to be fired. And someone is monitoring you. Constantly. We even know what brand of socks you're wearing.
Computer security expert Chad Harrington regularly surfs Internet Relay Chat (IRC), one of the oldest chat technologies on the Web. Now, anyone who thinks this is going to be a smartly written tech story after that sentence needs to be lined up against the wall.
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
Damn it's about time... IRC has been around for what 15 years or so? This is the first major news outlet that I have seen report anything on it. Ohhh and it is not that anonymous. Anyone with a ounce of knowledge knows how to get info from IRC.
...this whole topic is going to be irrelivent once the entire internet is shut down because it's a haven for terrorists.
----- sXe
But it's just another Internet tool like email, USENET or WWW. It can be used for good or ill just like anthing else. I don't think it's any more secure from monitoring than any other protocol. Anon [mixmaster] email actually seems the least traceable.
I think this is just a slander-by-association: someone doesn't find IRC participants "nice" [=like them] so choses to consider all IRC participants gulity by association. Might as well consider all email users evil, same logical fallacy.
wow this guy is uniformed. anyone who doesn't know the difference between hacker and cracker shouldn't be writing an article about either in the first place.
I'm too lame for sigs
Criminals are known to use cars. Such trademarks as Ford, Chrysler, etc. are very common. Some extreamly sleazy criminals even use Japanese cars.
This must be stoped!
Hackers also live in houses, which they use to store computers that are used to run various hacking projects. Obviously, something needs to be done about this housing problem. People should have to obtain a license or pass some kind of inspection, or else have their house taken away from them.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"I chat, therefore I am... a hacker"
Riiiiight.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
That was a good laugh.. and my friends.. that's why it was posted to /. :)
:) Surprised they didn't talk about that.
:) I met both my partners of my company (Web Hosting/Web Development) on IRC, and they have been good friends ever since. It is quite the successful business, and I have learned much since then... all because of IRC (well, I guess not that much.. I'm still using /. ;)
;better person.. to react in the right mannor (not just to get +o.. or plus +O for that matter ;0)
:) afaik :)
I've been IRC'ing since 1992. That's 10 years, and I'm still not a veteran.
Some of the World's (Internet's) greatest heros and founders hang out on EFNet/IRC or some like service...
Remember BBS?
It's so typical for people to lash out on things they do not understand. More or less, its all too typical that they never emphasize the best parts about it. I mean comon.. Let's think about it.
IRC is a place to share knowledge, not just CC #'s (who are they kidding.. I have never been asked to trade a CC # or anything of the like.) Many of the World's 'hackers' (or techies that work for YOUR company) can acredit their knowledge (or at least the start) to IRC. I know I can.
I knew nothing (well, not nothing, a tincy bitty bit) about the Internet, its structure, protocols, computers, other operating systems, etc. before I came to IRC.
It all started with the 'need' to have an eggdrop bot in my channel.. How the hell was I to do this?
*shrug* I didn't know what I was doing.. but I got my hands on a free WOPR.net shell, (if anyone knows who I'm talking about.. send a shout out.. I'm curious) and was forced to learn a bit of unix commands (heh) to opperate the bot...
By and by I had shell after shell.. learning more about *nix as the opportunity came along. I eventually had the oppertunity to have root on a friends system (from IRC) and learned more and more about the system and how it worked.
Fast forward a bunch of years
The news concentrates on the bad things always.. I've become a better person because of IRC, completely. Not only have I learned a tone of IT stuff.. I've also learned how to be a
Much of the Internet success stories are because of IRC, and I feel this article fails to discuss this... That is a bad thing, and this is why us 'hackers' seem to get a bad rep.
Oh yeah.. IRC didn't teach me how to spell, really
------------
Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
"A lot more credit card numbers are stolen than ever used, but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the Net."
To me this says, that I should assume, in my wallet is a stolen credit card. Well, there isn't, and I don't need to check. I have one credit card, and since I get a statement every month with my name on it, I obviously didn't steal it.
Now if he's just a confusing person and is actually saying that I should assume that one of my credit card numbers has been stolen. Well, as long as everyone out there practices some basic security, they shouldn't worry about that either. The first thing is to make sure you have fraud protection on your credit card (most have a $50 limit now). Second, look at your statement! If you just pay your bill without examining the charges, well, send me your credit card number!
Nothing stops people from having such an opinion or media (short of threatening their own ad revenue stream) from exploring such ideas. When we as private citizens speculate, or even assert, we're now hearing that corporate america and cretins with a lack of moral and/or ethical fibre (lowercase 'a' used intentionally) sue people to shut them up.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of subpoenas...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
from http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hacke r.html
hacker n.
[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker.
Seems to me if "hackers" are using IRC could be to the advantage of all those who want advances in technology...
-- ribbit
"Hackers" getting personal information and selling it to other "hackers" is bad.
Corporations getting personal information and selling it to other corporations is good.
People with tightly held secrets are suspect.
Corporations with tightly held secrets are to be trusted.
A person trying to extort people is a thug and scam artist.
A corporation trying to extort people is just protecting the artists.
OK. I got it. Now can I incorporate myself? I think I'd be much better off as a corporation than as a citizen.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
"It's older, it's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company, it's one of the Internet protocols ... so if you're running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it," says Schneier. "So it's not that it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service and people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC."
There's the only useful statement in the whole fscking article. What a loaf of fertilizer. Must have been a boring newsday for the CNN "tech" crew...
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Yeah! True hackers live at IRC and still haven't figured out what protocol IRL implements.
There are some alarming quotes from Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Technologies, such as "people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC".
It actually seems to me that Schneier did a pretty good job of preventing some editor from slapping an alarmist breaker along the lines of "IRC is a tool designed for smelly hackers" into the piece; take a look at the full quote:
"It's older, it's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company, it's one of the Internet protocols ... so if you're running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it," says Schneier. "So it's not that it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service and people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC." [Emphasis added.]
He goes out of his way to point out that there's nothing that makes IRC particularly "suited" to nefarious purposes, but rather that its non-corporate nature is likely to appeal to anti-corporate people. (That, of course, is an assertion that can be argued forever, but it doesn't strike me as too alarming.)
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
I may have skimmed a little too lightly, but I didn't see anyone mention that CNN actually runs one of the best IRC servers used for interactive televsion! When Mir was returning to Earth, there were well over 800 people in the room.
Then, with Talkback Live, they make excellent use of AIM and IRC. Very forward thinking.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Running shoes allow thieves and armed robbers to flee the scene from their victims. We must take away everyone's shoes. Won't anyone please think of the victims?
Any guesses as to how many posts on this thread will...
::insert whatever:: using ridiculous slippery-slope logic.
- Call CNN a bunch of morons.
- Suggest that we should therefore ban
- Say "Duh".
...without showing ANY evidence of reading the article, or making any factual statements whatsoever?
Really, now.
Now, for those with actual central nervous systems and who actually care about facts rather than knee-jerk responses:
IRC is a multiperson always-on real-time worldwide system, and is therefore more conducive to exchanges and marketing than phones, pagers and their ilk. There's no comparison, really, except for morons, because while a phone system at most might be a small-scale party line, messages on IRC can reach nigh-arbitrary amounts of people whom you DON'T need to have previous knowledge of. Even if you do NOT have any intended buyers in mind, calling random people and offering credit card numbers is stupid. Sending a CC list offer to an appropriate IRC channel is less stupid, in that you can reach more people at once, and they're voluntarily reading so they're more likely to be interested. Plus, there's no Caller ID, and if you're bright you may be using a compromised machine so that your own IP isn't shown. If the distribution of logs crosses national borders, it may be quite a hassle for anybody to ever find your identity -- assuming that you can maintain anonymity during an exchange, of course, by not screwing up by, say, using one of your own personal bank accounts.
And, most people who read CNN have little experience with IRC. Therefore, it's fair to give them a "heads up", especially, say, if they've got a teen who's spending a lot of time online and ordering more stuff than you think he could afford, or similar situations... this merely provides a bit of awareness to the technologically naive.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
God forbid that something on the internet should be unfettered.
FUD at it's finest. Too bad CNN can't bring themselves to report this eagerly on something, say, like corruption in politics.
I've noticed that a lot of the 2600 meetings take place in malls and bookstores. I'm sure people would be loathe to shut down a shopping mall, because that would be bad for the economy, and therefore un-American. But the bookstores? Burn 'em to the ground! That way, hackers won't come together, and you can prevent people from getting access to any sort of subversive materials. You might have to pin red "H"s on the hackers and post security at the doors of the mall.
blog |
I don't know if it's just me but when I read about some CEO saying something against something or someone else I see the words "vested interests" in the background, or has anyone forgotten MS' Mundie vs. Linux , MS vs. Unix, Brilliant's Chief thief vs. everyone's PC?
What worries me more in these times of security paranoia is this: The underlying motives of said CEO's comments are often not as transparent as those of MS's Bosses and what is worse is that there are enough other braindead people who do not think for themselves who will take said CEO's words as gospel.
since the dawning of time evil men have thwarted to abuse the societies they dwell in. ever since the original urge to evolve from single celled space snots into the form of the human being, this evil force has compelled a portion of our fair species to evolve one step beyond the main stream. as early as the 1800s humans have developed simplistic vocal patterns used to convery root directives between what we refer to as "nodes". these nodes, when in a collaberative setting, can communicate rapidly, and the use of technology has only spread this disturbing pattern. eventually is is conceivable that these evil nodes will dominate the world with their bloodthirsty lust for communication.. modern day usage of "internet" relay chats indicates what we shall call "Big Trouble Ahead". If given time to spread, we may find that evil nodes of human clusters will continue their ravaging in search of the ultimate form of communication. we as reasonable members of the species must do everything we can to thwart this insidious infestation. Indeed, our very futures depends on it.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Some other media that the CNN article forgot to mention:
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Is it just me, or does this guy sound like the extend of his knowledge about "hackers" is limited to what he learned from the movie of the same title?
I dunno how many of you nerds know Bayes Theorem but it's one of the first rules and statisticians learn and, annoyingly, it is one of the more unintuitive arguments for the uninitiated
<Offtopic>I can't stand the current Cannibis debate in the UK where people state something like that 95% of heroin addicts used Cannibis first as a gateway drug. Therefore Cannabis should be illegal. While I agree Cannabis should be illegal, that argument is a statistically false one because you cannot say that 99% of cannabis users go on to take heroin. That would be significant</offtopic>
Here, just because I imagine 99% of script kiddies use IRC, does not mean we should be anti IRC. You cannot map it to the proper argument where I imagine only <1% of all IRC users have anything to do with hacking and scripting. If you, for example, kill IRC, you upset 99% of the populatoin and script kiddies go elsewhere
Exploitation of people's misunderstanding of Bayes makes the easiest and most effective weapon in the world of FUD
Just showing that to 'prove' he's an 'expert'
"Once the hacker or someone in the underworld has personal information, credit card numbers, social security numbers, address, whatever it may be," says Harrington, once the hacker "has that information and wants to sell it, often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat (emphasis mine) which provides them some anonymity and allows them to mention that they have this personal information and they want to trade."
Does this remind anyone of the warez article that was out a while ago? I'm embarassed that people like this are considered experts.
"It's older, it's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company, it's one of the Internet protocols ... so if you're running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it," says Schneier. "So it's not that it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service and people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC."
This spokesperson is basically saying that chat outside the venue of a benevolent, all-watching big corporation is evidence of intent to cause harm to the capitalist system, by extension. (and don't forget all of the child molesters hanging out on ... er... AOL!!)
While many are mocking the origin of the story, don't laugh.
Civil liberties can easily be eroded by the F.U.D. and implied subversion that a large media company such as CNN can implant in the minds of readers over a perior of time. "Chat room" == "bad unsupervised people up to no good" can become implanted in reader's minds subtly by repetition... with the terrorism paranoia running rampant in our society, spin like this ain't positive.
"people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC"
should say
"We are very disturbed that people have an avenue to express their First amendment rights. We as a corporation want the right to swindle, steal and lie without other people expressing their concerns about it to others"
I've been on irc for 4 years now... It wasnt until recently that I discovered that I too had turned into a criminal... Its obvious that meerly joining a chatroom slowly turns you into a l33t h4>0rz" warning messages Oh how ashamed am I :/
CNN is carrying an article about IRC and how it aids "chemists" with their mischief
CNN is carrying an article about IRC and how it aids "teachers" with their mischief
Aids hackers? To do what? Talk! Jesus, do I have a fucking mouth and what does it do?
I don't see them printing: "MSN Messenger 'Group Chat' feature aids hackers!" Has greater implications. Also, noone 'owns' IRC. Distributed, free, run by volunteers. Excellent for millions.
This credit card theft, cracking, terrorism promoting menace of a protocol and its operational cells must be stamped out immediately! Somebody call John Ashcroft!
I'll take irony for 500, Alex.
The government ought to regulate and monitor this somehow!! *NOT!!!*
And most people (and journalists) do not understand IRC and when investigating 'chat rooms' they usually end up in Java chats somewhere. ( I will laugh if they try to ban Java because of this. It would be a double edged sword because IBM and Sun would oppose it with the force of $Billions and actual IRC would never be addressed.)
This article is an example of the blind leading the blind (i.e. journalists leading readers) and is a perfect example of how the 'war against terrorism' is becoming outrageously off-topic in how it is applied.
Article about IRC. Picture of Netscape on CNN.com
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
They are JUST figuring this out..or what? If they just found out that 'hackers' like to hang out on IRC & chats, they are a little outdated.
That criminals use the internet for 'identifty teheft' is not news Even the US government is on the case:
The original article seemed very alarmist. Is it really such a problem? My skimming of a US government report from some years ago revealled the following interesting information (emphasis added):
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
But IRC is largely unregulated -- a Wild West of chat...
YEEEHA!! I'm gonna rustle me up some trout to slap!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I wonder who's laughing the loudest at this: Us or the FBI.
I can already see it now...
In other words, just more FUD to get Joe Blow to bend over a little further. Plus, it wouldn't hurt AIM, now would it?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I really wish they would at least mention that IRC for the most part is just ppl getting together online like they would in real life, doing completely legit things and yes even helping people out in some places. The slant on the article is way to anti-IRC, it's like saying "clubs aid pedophiles in trading kiddie pr0n." I can see how some techno-n00b parents could start restricting their childrens IRC access purely because of this article. :(
Reminds me of this article.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
...but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the Net."
Opens up wallet.
OMG! He's right! Someone stole a CC number off the Internet and put it in my wallet! These hackers are good!
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
is unworthy of repetiton. It is poor journalism of the most illiterate kind, engineered to whip up hysteria over something as old as the hills.
The author "With more than 23 years of journalism experience to draw from, Renay San Miguel is a technology anchor and correspondent for CNN Headline News based in CNN's world headquarters in Atlanta....From 1997-2000 he was with CNBC, where he served as a correspondent specializing in technology and the Internet. "
really needs to have 23 years of experience in how to research a story. And anyway, how on EARTH can someone from 1997, "..specializing in technology and the Internet.." not have ever used or seenIRC???
If he knows what IRC is, and STILL wrote that, then he really is just a sh1t stirrer, first class.
Nothing to see here: move along!
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
But with identity theft becoming a more popular form of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), more attention is being paid to chat rooms that serve as flea markets for hackers.
This is the real thrust of the article, although it's brevity and excessive misuse of the word "hacker" makes it easy to miss. The article isn't slamming IRC as an evil haven of credit card thieves, it's pointing out that there's an entire chunk of the Internet called IRC that most people aren't aware of, and that it's possible, if not likely, that your credit cards and other personal information are being bought and sold on it right now.
Isn't it about time the media realized the difference ./hacking abilities.
between a hacker and a _cracker_? I've spent
enough time on IRC to know 99% of the people they
talk about in this article are just clueless
12 year olds who try to impress eachother
with their 'el33t'
CNN employees spend over 90% of company time chatting on CNN's own IRC server instead of reporting real news.
A study yet to be done finds qualified programmers who are denied employment by all major corporations seem to be anti corporation.
God spoke to me
We are the informed few. 99.9% of people that frequent this site are very aware of IRC and the possible dangers therein. I use IRC daily. I have been for years and in this time, i have noticed the amount of 'newbs' that show up on a daily basis. These people are NOT informed of the openess of IRC and should be warned.
CNN, I applaud you.
Also, if they don't know what theyre doing, then they should go to AOL chat...
thelikesofwhich.com
"A lot more credit card numbers are stolen than ever used, but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the Net." WHAT IS THIS FUD??! Can we get a statistic to back any of this up? Why doesn't CNN fact-check tech stories? ..
"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
In Other News:
Prepaid Calling Cards can be used for bad.
Disposable Cell Phones can be used for bad.
Pretty much anything can be used for bad.
Ok ... time to get back to surfing for pr0n ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Yes IRC is a great tool and sometimes it can be a lot like ebay. I've gotten some good hardware that I can't find anywhere else just by talking to people on IRC.
Of course these people will go to IRC chat rooms all the time, hell like every other type of computer geek on the internet they like to boost. It's natural for a geek to go somewhere and brag about their exploits.
The claim that identity theft is running wild and it's the fault of the hackers is an amazing assumption. While I do believe things like this happen to people around on many occasions. I do not believe it's as large scale as some people would have us believe. I have seen many more cases where identity theft is caused by people in the real world either losing their wallets. or other malicious deeds in which a criminal gets information from a victim.
You should automatically assume your credit card was stolen? Frankly if your not reviewing your credit card transactions you are a fool. But again. there are many more cases of this happening because of a store employee collecting the information some nameless computer hacker who is out to get you.
Why would things like pirated software, child pornography, and stolen information be available on IRC? It's a quicker communication medium. It's easier and faster for people to exchange the information then web pages or e-mail.
People use IRC networks like EFNET, DALNET, GAMESNET, etc. as opposed to AOL or Microsoft because the big business companies consider their users to be morons that don't need more advanced forms of software. When your network blocks out all types of profanity because it's "bad" many people are going to look to communicate where they can speak as they wish.
As for the law enforcement issue it is up to all the irc networks in question to regulate the going on in their own set of servers. I'll use Gamesnet as an example. They are constantly attempting to stop the "warez trade" from happening on their network and have assisted law enforcement when they find out their users are committing crimes.
The FBI gets lucky because like all criminals people who are involved in things like identify theft, child pornography sing like canaries. that's the only reason they get lucky. the boasting of hackers helps the FBI catch hackers
Every time I'm on there, all I see is 37iTe haX0rs!! There must be THOUSANDS of them!
Its also haven for kiddie pr0n, movie traders, child mollestors, terrorists, horny teenagers, and 15 year olds that think they are hackers. Oh yeah, and my mom sits in #40something =P She goes in the category of 'CNN forgot that part'.
Can all fish swim?
I'd really like to see some information to back this up. It seems kinda of like a manipulation of numbers to scare people. It seems very unlikely to me that EVERYONE has a number floating around the 'net....
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
DUH
woof!
Why is it that AOL's proprietory terminology dominates the technology that predates it? It's not a "Chat Room". It's a channel. Read the god damn rfc!
Section 1.3:
A channel is a named group of one or more clients which will all
receive messages addressed to that channel. The channel is created
implicitly when the first client joins it, and the channel ceases to
exist when the last client leaves it. While channel exists, any
client can reference the channel using the name of the channel.
In fact, search the rfc for the word "room" and you wont find it! You're in the real world now people, drag yourself away from the smothering bossom of AOL and grow the hell up.
How we know is more important than what we know.
We need to get rid of cellphones/pagers immediately. Oh yeah and D&D too b/c we wouldn't want anyone to become satanic.
The USA while being the greatest country in the world is still a piece of shit. I wonder what that makes the rest of the world? Probably a grease trap or something along those lines.
It's depressing that a big "news" company like CNN (OK, I know it's an entertainment business, but they still call themselves a news channel) can't even hire a decent geek to sit in a broom closet and proofread their drivel.
On the plus side, you do have to give them credit for not trying to make their point about the evils of IRC by saying that terrorists use it to coordinate activities. These days you use the T-word to push any cause (carnivore, &c.)
According to this guy, using AMD, Bonzai Buddy, Flash, and Quake makes you a hacker.
Depending on how you read it, it's either hilarious parody or a woefully misinformed parent. I was in the hilarious parody camp until I saw the rest of his articles.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
...or today two of more or less famous among computer-using population people for, both named Bruce, and with last names starting with "S" (Bruce Sterling, a writer, and Bruce Schneier, a cryptographist, of "Applied Cryptography" fame) made absolutely inane statements, performing the acts of nearly the worst ass-kissing that ever was mentioned on Slashdot?
Is someone going through the list (sorted first name first, like every ignorant person will do) and doing something to those people? Is there something in common? Or everyone and his dog suddenly became a patriot of the Corporate States of America, so those coincidences are merely a result of high density of this ?
To be honest, I would be equally disgusted in both cases, so I'll rather stick with the hypothesis of my insanity.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
They should check SILC - next generation distributed conferencing with strong cryptography used for authentication and privacy.
... this article being the exclusion... only took them 14 years to figure it out.
85% of Americans think this signature sucks
In other news, bars and clubs are coming under fire for being havens for drunks, deviants and criminals. Churches are coming under fire because we need to protect our kids from secual deviants using the lord's work to help them out. Universities and libraries are known hide outs for communists, terrorists and dangerous foreign nationals called "graduate students." Shopping malls and "high schools" are breeding grounds for gangs of teenagers associated through shocking dress, style and manors of speech that are anathem to the status quo; these kids want to shake things up in deadly new ways. Department stores are selling guns, cigarettes, alcohol and dangerous narcotics such as aspirin and caffeine. Oh, and private homes -- which are difficult to monitor due to laws designed to protect criminals and prevent beneficial government employees from knowing what's really going on -- are the worst of all. People are torturing kids, raising deadly animals and polishing guns, ready to start a revolution against your great american goverment.
And I don't totally trust this "Applebees" restaurant chain, neither. John Birch says they're pinkos.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Damn hackers, all they do is sit around and don't pay big corporations money!
This is all a big conspiracy (on purpose or not) to erode our individual freedoms of speech, privacy, and the right to not spend our hard earned money.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
The original article sucks, the article in Slashdot sucks even more.
Everything out of context and biased, I guess that's journalism and Slashdot nowadays.
From Harrington: ...often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat...
Sounds like my grandpa.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
CNN is owned by AOL, a company whose strategy includes monopolizing real-time Internet chat. Is it any wonder that CNN is publishing stories that spread FUD about competing chat technologies?
'course, there's also an article on the CNN front page, under the Money section, entitled, "How low can AOL go?"
So, hey, maybe it's just simple stupidity after all.
It took CNN just over a decade to realize the protocol IRC uses for chatting, is habitated by hackers.
WWW.WHATTHEF#$K.COM! NO SH** people. It would seem reasonable to me that since hackers are basically accredited for having built up the protocol, that it's userbase would also, therefore, be hackers.
Talk about Investigative reporting. Thanks CNN, for wasting America's time.
Incase you guys didn't know, cnn officially runs an IRC server as well.
chat.cnn.com
try it =)
CNN is owned by AOL. AIM is owned by AOL. IRC competes with AIM.....
Hmm, CNN goes into a chat room called HACKERSRUS
and decided that chatrooms are a haven for hackers.
Mindset here seems to be that everything happening in the universe has to be somebody's fault.
Not limited to online interaction, the implication seems to be that we (or this guy anyway) live in a society not so much competitive as predatory, where everything said and done is motivated by the need to chalk up another victim. Completely alien to this is the concept that an IRC conversation or any other exchange between two people is innocuous - with no winner or loser, and perhaps no significant meaning at all.
Maybe the dude is right in the context he's thinking of: If he had the (good?) fortune to have his credit card lifted somehow with a major and well funded corporation to blame, and took care to select a jury of credulous nitwits, which is how that game is usually played, he could end up with a large enough $$$$$$ettlement that he could piddle off from journalism and never have to work another day in his life.
With an attitude like that though, wow. No wonder the sonofabitch doesn't like IRC.
give me a
Looks like somebody just discovered "NEW HAVEN OF HACKERS" over at CNN. Yeah, yeah I know we are all making fun of CNN here for being such doofuses but hold on a sec.
,and unless you are a total geek and all of your friends happen to be geeks as well, they will have no clue what the IRC is. None at all. Yes the IRC is one of the last "Wild West" parts of the web. Its one of the last few places you can actually go to and not be censored because you said the f-word off-hand.
Ask 99% of the people you know (parents/relatives/friends)
Well at least, tho the article is slanted, I won't have to explain what the IRC is to my friends quite as much, I'll just have to explain to them that I'm not a criminal, thanks for that CNN.
This article sadly is true. I remember an online friend said his ident kept changing, so I had him do a netstat and send me the results. It turned out his computer was connected to a server on port 6667. I connected and found he was one of about 30 computers on this homemade IRC server. Every 10 minutes or so the computers would report their status, and the owner of this IRC network was sending them commands. It was really interesting, but consequently they kick-banned me off the server and tried to ping flood me :)
There is no way to shut "IRC" down. IRC is not a single entity.
Anyone can download an ircd and start their own {server,network}. It's much like gnutella or other P2P variants.
RFC 1459 defines an open standard for the IRC protocol. Anyone can implement this, much like anyone can implement their own DHCP or S/KEY implementation.
There is no central IRC authority. Operators have the scope of the network on which they reside (if even that).
*sighs*
Yes, but the government would have to hire thousands of people to do the monitoring. What a terrible job. And, the government would have no way of monitoring the employees to discover if they were doing well.
This was so last week...
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Please mod me down, so you can't give someone else the mod up they deserve. Thanks.
"CNN's startling revelation came as a shock to world community as it was revealed for the first time that cars are used by Hackers world wide. Also revealed was their use of spoons, sidewalks and paper."
"This has gone on long enough!" one senator was reported as saying. "These Hacker-related items must be federally controlled or they will be abused!" When it was pointed out that cars were used by normal, law-biding citizens as well, the senator launched into an Anti-Hacker tirade before driving off to his next appointment."
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Cause she knows i am on IRC a lot, so now she will think i am a hacker!
which i am ofcourse i hack some c every day, but never the less this could set my reputation in a wrong perspective, lets DDoS CNN again =D
Quazion.
It was on yesterday afternoon. The report gave me the feeling that AOLTW felt somehow threatened by IRC. IMHO they ran the story to rally opposition because they are scared of music /MP3-info swapping. It also made me wonder if AOLTW just wanted IRC to disappear so they could push their IM tool even more. There was just something truly biased that I could not put my finger on. Everything else -- including the info on credit card theft -- was just a red herring to justify the news byte.
Calling King Kong....time for your shock therapy treatment...
"A lot more credit card numbers are stolen than ever used, but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the Net."
How is a statement like this helpful in any way? Are people supposed to stop using credit cards period? These paranoid 'experts' need to realize that while this sort of thing may happen, it doesn't mean that it has already happened to you. Scaring people does nothing to help them.
Perhaps a little off topic.. but this got me thinking, is there any kind of 'secure IRC' client/server, or does the IRC protocol have encyption options in-built?
I'm not talking about anything major, but just an SSH/SSL type thing to stop your boss sniffing packets for text etc. I'v seen people use SSL for connection to talkers/MUDs/MUSHes in the past, but IRC has always seemed rather open.
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
From the CNN article (reprinted without permission):
"Once the hacker or someone in the underworld has personal information, credit card numbers, social security numbers, address, whatever it may be...has that information and wants to sell it, often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat which provides them some anonymity and allows them to mention that they have this personal information and they want to trade."
Right -- IRC is a special place on the Web. I can think of a special place where this guy belongs.
What does it take for CNN to call someone an expert? Usually an expert in medicine has to be an MD. An expert in computers (or in this case, computer security, has to be self-described as such).
Lastly, is IRC really the "wild-west" of the internet? Its certianly monitored by federal law enforcement. See this article (actually, the link to the real article is here) about the FBI monitoring IRC as a tool to bust suspected crackers.
-Turkey
-Turkey
I know that CNN is supposed to be "for the masses" as some have said here when applauding the story. I don't see that gives them a right to mis-inform. There are a number of not just technically inaccurate (which almost any CNN story would be to this crowd), but odd illogical statements. To wit:
... so if you're running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it," says Schneier. "So it's not that it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service and people who are anti-big-corporation are going to be more likely to use something like IRC."
"It's older, it's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company, it's one of the Internet protocols
So, let's see:
* Anti-big-corporation (ABC) people are more likely to be hackers and thieves (see: 'Enron').
* Software that is multi-platform is ABC (as is multi-platform in general I imagine).
* Software that is simple (basic) is ABC.
* ABC people are more likely to use Unix and Mac. I guess they meant "for their personal use", rather than as the target of their "hacking" (cracking).
Sheesh, quite a lot of rubbish packed into one small paragraph.
So, let's see. To avoid "hackers" and be a "good guy", I should use a complex, single-platform software suite backed by a major corporation. Then I'd be safe, and wouldn't be a "bad guy". I guess I can see where this is heading.
I got IRC because I needed a straight-forward chat arrangement for a specific (intranet) reason. It was cheap (or free) and I had control within my network. I use it on the internet (I chat very little, but when I do) for many of the same reasons. That, and no bloody adverts.
I have worked for big corporations. They use many platforms (including Unix and Macs and MS), like multi-platform software, and prefer something straight-forward and simple (although they don't achieve it as much as they'd like). They even used IRC when they needed to. They are definitely NOT anti-big-corporation.
So, worse rubbish than usual for CNN. Considering their association with AOL, and their competing chat technology, I DON'T consider this informing the great un-techie unwashed masses. It's just bad, and to the point of questionable news-ethics-wise.
Smilodon
V V
jt.
I'm spent.
CNN CLOSED thier chat server.
CNN CLOSED thier message boards.
CNN CHARGES for video now.
http://www.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/
CNN IS ENTERTAINMENT WITH ZERO RESPONSIBILITY.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
No
IRC is a centralized system
There can be many servers - just like there can be many ICQ servers (and indeed there are)
these servers can be linked (indeed, they are)
you can have stand alone servers (I believe there was an ICQ server downloadable?)
anyone can download and start up their own ICQ network
gnutella is based on the principle that the client is the server for other clients
IRC is based on the principle that clients connect to a server which relays information
the IRC servers network can be considered to be a peer to peer operation, but irc chat by normal clients cant...
By a centralized system, its not exclusive to situations where there is one and only one server that EVERYONE has to use, but centralized systems are ones that can be shut off thus preventing clients from connecting
if the clients are the servers (as in gnutella) then its decentralized
otherwise its still centralized
Just because its centralized, doesnt mean there is a realistic way of shutting it down
DNS is centralized but its been designed to be difficult to shut down (by unauthorised parties that is)
I don't have a credit card in my wallet, how can you have its number?
I don't have a wife either. Nor a job.
Yes, someone is monitoring me. I think I'll say hello to them...
You know what brand my socks are? can you please tell me?
... attempting to be honest and proving that it isn't always worth it...
Everyone is idle! :)
idle : 116 hours 35 mins 1 secs (signon: Tue Apr 2 19:47:05 2002)
"C'mon, I thought hackers talked here!"
"Turns out it's just a vanity thing!"
proton != antielectron
"In the electronic world of the Internet, it's such a vast landscape and there's no way that the FBI and CIA or any law enforcement agency can be involved in watching over the shoulder of every Internet user," says Harrington. "Unfortunately, that's probably what it would have to take to prevent this sort of fraud."
I wonder if Chad Harrington has ever heard of Carnivore.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I didn't know that you "surf IRC" or that it is "one of the oldest chat technologies on the Web".
You have to give credit to good old news centrals that spread enlightment among the people. Now I know better than before.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Friend of a friend is a cop on cyber-patrol (no, really) in MI. He spends a lot of his time on IRC setting up stings. Mainly they persue child porn offenders, but just FYI, the cops ARE active in IRC and other IM clients, and could persue this if they wanted to.
Imagine if Cannabis did not exist. (well hard to imagine since it is responsible for the very thing we call civilization - via cultivation).
Imagine how many heroin uses there would be if cannabis did not exist.
I think there would be a lot more heroin users.....
I think the real gateway drug are flintstones vitamins. Or those 'Bubble Blow' toys shaped like pipes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Any news source or any so-called "expert" that labels any and every very different subset of internet-bound network protocols as "The Web" oughta be shot before having their balls severed.
"The Web" refers to HTTP.
IRC is not the web.
The internet is not the web.
CNN already never bore much credibility in my book. Such shallow and poorly-researched article, clearly begging for "public's attention", filled with buzz-words, and offering such a one-sided vision of issues at hand, clearly proves what I have believed all along.
Here's a free clue to CNN editors: when hackers *need* a way, they find it. If it's not IRC, then they'll gather on bulletin board systems. That'll be their big come-back. Because that's where they used to gather before that. And if that still doesn't do it, they'll gather on public web forums. And if that doesn't work, they'll come up with a peer-to-peer chat protocols with emphasis on communities. Most Instant Messaging systems already offer you that. It'll just get expanded. And if that still doesn't work, trust me, the demand *will* be there, and new network protocols will be created. To accomodate grass-roots communities. It is amazing the things you can do with TCP/IP. If the more popular IRC networks get snooped or shut-down, then many more little irc servers will rise. Anyone with a DSL connection a shitty old PC can download many free, open-source flavors of the popular "IRC Daemon" software, "ircd", and set-up a very reliable and fairly scalable IRC server. Get two people together on different connections and you have a network. Each server can have thousands of simultaneously connected users.
The point i'm trying to bring home here, is that there will *never* be a shortage of venues for hackers to go about their illicit business. It clearly is sad, as such practices and articles like this one tend to focus the public's opinion on restricting our own liberties to *absolutely NO CONCLUSIVE END*.
That article clearly mingles without any distinction the "underground" aspect of IRC with "anti-corporation" stance and "identity-theft hackers".
Lemme make this clear:
it is NOT OKAY to steal identity and be a hacker. it's lame too.
it IS OKAY to be against corporation-hosted chat networks and for grass-roots communities such as IRC.
it IS OKAY to prefer "less-popular" communities to find like-minded geeks, such as ones we'll find on IRC.
If CNN had any clue, any journalistic integrity, they would at least try to bring some of those points home in their article. But they keep quoting that same guy, over and over, with scary buzz-phrases and words your average american will just eat-up.
Next thing you know, parents will only allow their children to "hang out" on AOL chat-rooms. "No more IRC for you son, it's evil, CNN sez so, mm-MMM".
Can we see a corporate agenda here?
fuckingshit.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
I'm pretty sure it's an IRC *channel*, AOL has "rooms" to chat in. ;)
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
CNN are owned by AOL/Time Warner. AOL/Time Warner control two of the four major instant messaging systems (AOL, ICQ, the other two being MSN and IRC). CNN and other AOL/Time Warner owned news corps start bad-mouthing IRC, making it less socially acceptable. Many IRC servers are run from Universities, and with IRC becoming less socially acceptable justifying the related costs becomes more and more difficult. IRC dwindles in market share, with AOL taking up the slack. AOL's network now has a massive number of subscribers, and can even compete with Microsoft, who bundle their chat client with their operating systems.
Does this really sound so far-fetched?
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
....it has been found cybercrime involves unlawful use of electronic equipment. Experts baffled. News at ten.
At any rate, anyone that has a clue knows that any communication passing through an IRC server (whether its a public message, and /msg, with the exception of a DCC p2p connection) can be monitored.
What makes you think the FBI/CIA/NSA/{insert your favourite intelligence agency here} isn't already peered to all the IRC networks and patiently sifting through all the conversation logs? This is not rocket science.
why are people surprised? this is what I don't get
ceci n'est pas une signature
"In the electronic world of the Internet, it's such a vast landscape and there's no way that the FBI and CIA or any law enforcement agency can be involved in watching over the shoulder of every Internet user," says Harrington. "Unfortunately, that's probably what it would have to take to prevent this sort of fraud."
Does the thought never cross his mind, that perhaps the 'FBI and CIA or any law enforcement agency' shouldn't be involved in watching over the shoulder of every Internet user?
Big brother talk if I ever heard it.
Pope-abuse is a serious issue these days. As is nun-beating. And don't even get me started on the topic of penguin lust.
pooptruck
... sorry, it's a Philly joke and i could not resist.
anyway, back to topic... i think the term hacker is way too loaded right now in the mainstream media. just wait till someone "proves" that there are terrorists hacking away at the very foundations of e-business in america (MS hacking? ha!). then all hackers will be blasted with some charge of treason. it wouldn't be the first time a hacker was declared "a risk to national security", but in these paranoid times it could get dangerous.
I used to monitor president debates via their webcast, and that webcast also had a chatroom, that used Java IRC client.
:)
I looked in source of page and was able to connect to their chat server and rooms using mIRC.
Oh the irony
Haven't you seen Goodfellas recently?
If you, for example, kill IRC, you upset 99% of the populatoin and script kiddies go elsewhere
Reminds me of the copy protection stuff... "If you kill 'Fair Use', you upset 99% of the population and pirates get their music elsewhere"
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
This piss anyone else off? Jeez, hackers use IRC, they also use IM. Maybe we should disconnect all phones too
CNN is little more than television tabloid. Unfortunately, they dress up in the guise of a legitimate news service.
I have been ignoring them...
Heh. Mostly because parading out a bunch of conservative blonde bimbos like Ann "We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too" Coulter, shout 'em down windbags like Bill O'Reilly or "investigative" reporters like Geraldo "I'm not a hundred miles away from the friendly fire incident that I'm reporting on live and on-scene, trust me" Rivera doesn't really classify as news in most circles.
- Read more about chat-room hackers and identity theft in a chat with Entercept's Chad Harrington
Stone him! Grab your beards lads, erm, ladies!Someone might utilize a USEFUL tool in such a way that might entail malace. Among other things, IRC is useful for the following things:
Trading porn including child pornography (tm).
Trading illegal mp3's.
Trading illegal movies.
Trading illegal books.
Trading illegal software.
Trading illegal TV shows.
Stalking.
Preying grounds for Child Molesters (tm).
Learning BAD english "31337 anyone???"
Discussing illegal activity.
DOS zombie gathering points.
Trojan access gathering points.
Oh, and of course, its primary purpose, so that large groups of people can easily gather online in a user friendly way to discuss various topics of interest to them.
People, its a tool, nothing more. You can use it legally or illegally. I can cut butter or stab someone with a knife. I can buy food or drugs with money. I can use a telephone to call my friends to say hi, or I can prank call someone and threaten to have them killed. And yes, if I really wanted to, I could use IRC illegally. As could I with AIM, or yahoo's chat/forums, or anywhere else that I wanted to.
Yes CNN, Chat rooms are most likely havens for hackers (tm). Its not so much an issue of debate, but an issue of declaring the obvoius. I'll bet they use phones too. And Email. And websites. I mean, if there wasn't an internet, there would still be hackers even though all the reasons you think they're bad would be null and void. Hackers pre-date the internet, even those inflicted with malice. Although, script kiddies are a rather recent breed.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
/me slaps the FBI bot with a limp trout
Awhile back an entire database of card numbers was taken and STREAMED in an IRC channel. I believe it was EggHead's card database. Golly, this was reported all over and you didn't hear about it? The Reg carried it I'm sure as did others.
It was real, my card number was one of them and my card was cancelled\reissued by my bank. My big question though was WHY EggHead still had my card # on file. I went through my records and found that I'd not bought anything from them in over a year and yet my account was still being held by them - as was my E-mail judging from the SPAM barrage that followed this incident. Needless to say I've not bought ANYTHING from them since nor will I ever again. They lost my trust big time.
Rest assured credit card theft and identity theft happen all the time. I've now met two people who have had their identities stolen and it sux! Depending upon the circumstances getting a new SN can be a real PITA too. One of them hasn't been able to sufficiently "justify" a new SSN and has to explain the whole thing every time they need credit.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
well, anyone who knows anything about how IRC works (ie, a "hacker") knows that it has to be the most insecure method of communicating out there. Your message to #whatever is going down the line to everyone else in the channel, in plain text.
,and not everyone on a server cares about "secure IRC", so some irc daemons are implementing secure channel modes, etc.
There is little doubt in my mind that the government already has something in place for monitoring IRC, what after all those "irc.psychic.com" web defacements a year or two ago.
Hacker crap asisde though, it's about time there was a secure method of chat to protect your messages from prying eyes (hackers, the government, or other). over at irc.leechbox.net, we're messing around with using SSL connections and providing backwards compatibility for all irc clients.
SSL only works if all parties involved are using it,
Authentication is another battle, "nickserv" just isn't secure enough. So i hope to see some proper use of SSL client and server certivicates in place sometime soon, but for now i'll settle with all text being encrypted.
Anyone remember lutzifer back in say 1992? That board was pretty cool and definetly a haven for starting trouble. QSD was ok too but that place was also full of warez kids...ah the good old days when x.25 was popular.
Dosn't CNN run their own, pretty popular IRC setup?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We live in a world of absolute freedom. We just choose to use that freedom to form governments to prevent the unscrupulous from abusing others.
Au contraire.
Those in power, that is, the power to limit your freedom and mine, inherited that power in a fairly unbroken succession going back, at minimum, centuries. Everyone else is subject to their will.
Don't you recall the ever-bandied figures of 2% of the world's population owning >90% of the world's wealth? Class distinctions are ubiquitous. "For the people, by the people" is a joke.
Encrypted, Anonymous, Opensource IRC.
IIP
Welcome to the world of PROPAGANDA. Psychologists know that people will subconsciously accept brazen lies if they are sufficiently tired, confused, or distracted before taking in the false causal statement. This is called "suggestability". They will subconsciously seek a (false if necessary) internal logic or even a leap-of-faith to understand the author. If they are too tired to question this understanding, they will keep it and use it as if it were fact, gleefully making false judgements baed upon the supposed "fact."
AKA: sales pitch.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
So what? How is meeting on IRC different from (physically) meeting in public places? (all kinds of) Hackers always had their virtual hangouts all over the net, and if one (kind) is shut down they'll find other places. The same places are used by other folks too, and while it may be interesting to observe that hackers dislike proprietary services like AOL (for reasons not only applying to hackers) that just means, that different places attract a different audience. Compare the demographics of a McDonalds with that of a tea-house for reference.
Now if the apparent fact, that some illegal activity is conducted via IRC should imply something about IRC (that it should be banned/forbidden, identify it's users, copy each message to the CIA) then the same is true for any public place, so let's start bugging pubs and demand a personal ID from everyone who goes there.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
Anyone notice that CNN runs an IRC server?
Ok people, there is a grain of truth to what CNN reports. Just spend a little time in the password chatrooms on DALnet; credit card numbers are streamed in there quite regularly.
From the CNN article: "We know that credit card numbers are bought and sold over the Internet because they have real cash value"
I'm wondering how one pays for these numbers or other information. By credit card? Ha.
I think having to exchange monies for whatever information defeats the idea of this anonymity that IRC chatrooms provide. Maybe one can send cash to a P.O. box somewhere. Still not 100% foolproof since someone can wait to see who shows up to collect the money.
And, haven't you heard not to send cash by the mail?
If you don't believe me, ask that guy over there.
As an American who has watched the Cable News Network (hereinafter "CNN") extensively, I feel compelled to offer the following information to the global information community of the Inter-net. The following piece of information will be useful for Americans.
I would like you to open your Internet Relay Chat (hereinafter "IRC") client, and instead of connecting to "leet-warez.ru", connect to "chat.cnn.com". Now you will have access to over ten illegals.
For more information, click here.
Boy, if these guys fear anti-corpororate users with hacker tendencies, then OpenProjects has to be public enemy #1!
8==8 Bones 8==8
It is amazing once you start to look at the numbers. Almost all corporate criminals and scam artist, crooked lawyers, dirty politians and judges all hung out and planned all or parts of their evil deeds at golf courses. And it is also a fact that they often traveled from state to state to visit different golf courses to conduct their illegal and harmful activities.
We must destroy all these places and create big paved parking lots in order to eliminate the place the criminals use to plan their deeds and thus help to fight these crimesand to protect the public.
From the article: "Computer security expert Chad Harrington regularly surfs Internet Relay Chat (IRC), one of the oldest chat technologies on the Web."
So now Internet is the same thing as the Web? Is mail then the oldest form of messaging over the Web?
--
\ Christian A Strømmen
If they do start silently monitoring EFNET etc then people will just stop using it and change to another network, in a similar way people switched to kazaa after napster died.
These clowns have no idea what the net is, they just want profits profits and profits from it .
reSisTanCe iS fUtILe
Let alone the fact that you have a better chance of your card# being taken from a resteraunt than a secure net connection... Heh.. No news in that, though.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
So basically, the implication is that if you're not pro-big-corporation, then you are anti-big-corporation? Can't I just be anti-YOUR-big-corporation?
"In a surprising move, the FTC has filed a motion to shutdown CNN for distributing news information to hackers who watch TV, citing that CNN "adds to the hacker's base of knowledge". CNN has rebuked this charge, saying that it's news has no informational value whatsoever and would there for be worthless to a hacker. Testimonies in the case begin next Tuesday."
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Hacker
(Originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe) 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in "a Unix hacker". (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. (Deprecated) A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker". The correct term is cracker.
In the correct sense I am sure there are a lot of Hackers who use IRC!
Where's that from?
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is with credit card numbers. The reason I say this is because it seems that most people don't think a whole lot about their credit cards.
Yes its a generalization, but I know this from experience--at least from where I live.
I work at Subway. We take credit card orders all the time. It would be trivial for me to copy down the credit card numbers we have in a little paper sack we keep the reciepts in. Am I legally responsible if I distribute these reciepts? Not that I know of.
Of course, I wouldn't do anything like that for the ethics of that. But there are a lot of people who perhaps wouldn't think that way.
Customers, I've found, don't give a rats ass about the security of their credit card. Think about it. Do you sign it? Where I work, we don't check the signatures anyway. I've began checking though but too often the signatures are too faded or unreadable anyway. Many of the more security conscious customers write "See I.D." in place of the signature. I asked someone for their ID the other day and they were surprised. It seems that our store isn't alone.
The big problem is that no one is trained properly for swiping cred cards. Basically employees train employees and so people only know what they need to know to get the job done.
It isn't all our fault either. Too many customers hand me their credit card before I've even rung up their meal. If they don't check the price on their reciept before they sign it, which I am sure most don't, I could easily run the credit card for an extra fifteen bucks, and then take fifteen bucks out of the register. Chances are, no one would know any better.
Credit card numbers are not secure and any fear on getting them over IRC is just empty hype. Of course we all know that. Credit cards could be relatively secure, but there are too many weak links in the chain. In the end, its up to you to protect yourself. Personally I would avoid using a credit card for small purchases. Only purchase at places where they *always* check your ID and always get a reciept.. The government isn't going to protect you and certainly these online tabloids aren't. Its up to you.
Little do they know that those of us who are anti-big-corporations already hang out on IRC. www.indymedia.org
Incidently, AOL actually runs a few irc servers. 2 of them are on Undernet. Maybe AOL shouldn't be the example. They used to have servers linked to all of the larger networks (except IRCnet afaik), but the old admin neglected them and only the Undernet servers remain.
I should probably do a google search before asking things.
Ah well. Have a good day.
Funny, up until the recent AOLization of CNN, CNN ran an IRC server for discussing their news stories. They even provided a newsticker through the IRC channel. They just shutdown the server in the last month or two.
Now that they are out of the IRC business, they are claiming it is used by hackers? Seems more like AOL has decided all those bad people on IRC should be chatting through AIM instead like good little sheep.
Basically all you need to do is monitor one or perhaps two hub servers. Of course if you have no users who are in a particular channel to make it route via your hub, get yourself an AOL account and join a client to the channel.
Often times I'm sure if the server admin had a warrant to allow monitoring of the server, do you think he is going to refuse? To protect script kiddies...I don't think so.
IRC by its nature is not a secure medimum of communication, nor is that the intention of IRC. If you *want* it to be a bit more secure, you'll need to do end-to-end encryption of all traffic between you and you and the person you are talking to. Of course this is the job of the client and not the server.
Of course people have a lot of misconceptions as to what IRC is supposed to be, the capabilities of the administrators. If you need to monitor some channel, if you have warrants handed too two or three of the admins on the major hub servers on the network, you have vibility to probably 90% of the traffic on the network.
Of course if all the users are on one server, this won't work. If somebody wants to see what you are saying bad enough on IRC, they'll be able to see it.
-Aaron (Hybrid IRCd coder)
During 9/11 chat.cnn.com irc server was the best place to get real time news.
Its irc fault... arrest irc!
These hackers also breathe in oxygen just like regular folks and some even build their computers! *gasp* They must have broken into Michael Dell's house and stolen the information to do so.
OH NOES! TEH INTARWEB IS BORKEN!
In that order.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
that if it is not 100% a micrpsoft product, hackers are prone to using it...
hmm, mr. goats must have really paid them off.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I repeat classes.
scott
IRC aids Hackers?
CNN aids American Propaganda.
Mikro$oft aids Globalization.
But this is definately true that:
OpenBSD aids freedom for ALL!
No matter how rich or poor you are, you have a freedom to use krypto for free of charge.
As a former EnterTheGame user, I have to say: hanging out there is bad for your mental health.
The network is run by some hopelessly incompetent people; they run several ircds on the same machine because they either want to look larger than they are, or have no idea how to support larger client loads with a single ircd. Rumor has it their services are written in Visual Basic - this seems quite plausible, since the machine they run on appears to be an NT4 box, as does linux.enterthegame.com. Ironic.
Recently, www.enterthegame.com was pointed at 127.0.0.1 for little more than a week. Their server list is hopelessly out of date, and uses some rather creative geography - according to EnterTheGame, Singapore is actually Sweden. There are server aliases that supposedly connect users to European, Asian, and African servers - these actually appear to point to servers in America and New Zealand.
Their service is awful; users are sometimes forced to wait for hours for someone to register channels. EnterTheGame's largest channels happen to be dedicated to anime fansubbing - hardly on-topic for what is supposedly a gaming network. For a network that seems to enjoy claiming title to the best gaming chat network in North America, they certainly don't show the technical proficiency or common sense you would think they'd need.
I recommend GamesNET. Their staff are far more competent at running an IRC network, and have even developed some very nice IRC services, called srvx.
In short, EnterTheGame sucks.
Congratulations! You're citation of the above quote was the 100,000th time it has appeared in a Slashdot forum.
Your prize is the honorary title of "Biggest Fucking Karma Whore In The Whole Fucking World," a title which you shall hold until the next time somebody gets moderated up to (Score: 5, Informative) for posting the 1,000,000th iteration of a registration-free link to a New York Times article, which should be any minute now.
Of course they are hacker free, at least in the U.S., you have to be 21!
They don't call 'em Script Kiddies for nothing.
often they'll go to a hacker chat room, a place on the Web using an Internet Relay Chat which provides them some anonymity [my emphasis]
Real "hackers" use IIP (Invisible IRC Project), which provides strong anonymity on IRC. Another, somewhat related, sweet project is SILC, which, though it doesn't provide anonymity, adds strong crypto to IRC.
Anonymity? Let's see what happens when I /whois myself on my favorite IRC server:
Hey, that's my host name! That translates into a Real World IP address, 207.225.41.92. The website was specified in the "real name" value provided by one's IRC client, which is readily changable. Often, the user name ('piranha' in '~piranha@dialup...') is changable as well, without ident on the client's site. But the host name is not.
I don't see how IRC is any more anonymous than AOL Instant Messenger chat rooms or ezboard.com or other "mainstream" communications fora. (0-day credit card numbers on Slashdot?)
For those that don't know, any user can /whois any other user on IRC and get their IP address. Very, very few servers intentionally obfuscate the host name to prevent tracing it down to a real person. As far as I know, the major networks (EFnet, Dalnet, Undernet, etc) do not whatsoever. Some silly IRC servers don't check reverse lookups to see if they match IP addresses (for example, if I come from 11.22.33.44, and 44.33.22.11.in-addr.arpa resolves to www.whitehouse.gov, www.whitehouse.gov won't resolve to 11.22.33.44), but exploiting that requires that you have control of your own reverse DNS zone. (Did I get my terminology right?) And even if people do pull that off, an administrator at the IRC server's site can pull off one of probably several tricks to see what the real IP address is. (Like, start a tcpdump session, saving to a log file, and CTCP or /msg the person, and see where the packet goes to.)
By the way, it's sort of ironic I chose irc.2600.net for this example in a retort to this article; this server really isn't full of 3r33t h4x0rz, and I have observed no identity theft or other fraud on #2600. If you don't believe me, stop by and see for yourself, which is apparently a bit too much to ask for from the people at CNN.
You can't deny that the open, underground nature of IRC makes it ideal for both hacking and illegal activity. (Notice how I specifically did not equate those activities :-)
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling - er - hacking - is going on in here!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
the peace of the dead?
Did they think hackers would be running MSN messager under wine, or what?
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Afghanistan is now our friend. Those currently in power have never been our enemy. That sounds a bit like the movie 1984
"Also, staring at the sun can cause blindness"
Oh, and I'm sorry to disappoint all of the kiddies out there who have been told otherwise, you won't go blind if you constantly engage in furious rounds of self-gratification. When only this and your work engross your life, you tend to often just sit at home and do your deeds alone--making you lose out on the chance to interact with other real, live people.
This makes it difficult to get the girls...and makes you more vulerable to fall victim to the BangBus!
Moral of the story? Don't waste your precious time by reading worthless stories such as this and posting to $lashdot. Get yourself outside and find something else you enjoy!
A.C.
coming to the realization that what's in the best intrest of one is in the best interest of all.
Thats like saying the internet is a haven for hackers. :-P
1. Run your own IRC server, or convince a friend to do so, and allow only SSL connections. Unreal, a popular ircd, supports SSL connections (port 994 by default). Unfortunately MIRC doesn't have built-in SSL capability, but it's very easy to get around this by running stunnel, a free (beer && speech), cross-platform SSL wrapper for any application. stunnel encrypts your text, sends it to the IRC server, receives the text and decrypts it for you. Essentially a multipurpose SSL proxy.
2. If you can't run your own IRC server, find one which a) supports SSL and b) is run by geeks. IIRC, irc.distributed.net allows you to create your own channels. I know it supports SSL and it's highly doubtful they're cooperating with law enforcement.
3. Avoid IRC and instead use an encrypted instant messaging program. I've found a few but I like Simp. It's free (beer && speech) and open source, too. It uses Blowfish to encrypt your messages, unfortunately you can only talk to one person at a time. But it can be convenient in a lot of situations.
I would really suggest options 1 and 3 if you're concerned with security. The only way to know for sure whether or not anyone else is listening, is if you control the environment.
Skate boarders are more likely to use drugs... so ban skateboards.. thats what the did in my city.. they have done it before and they will do it again
"Once the hacker or someone in the underworld has personal information, credit card numbers, social security numbers, address, whatever it may be," says Harrington, once the hacker "has that information and wants to sell it, often they'll go to a hacker back alley, a place in the city using an a mask which provides them some anonymity and allows them to mention that they have this personal information and they want to trade."
The ability for hackers to go onto the streets and chat up fellow hackers is as old as the city itself. But with identity theft becoming a more popular form of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), more attention is being paid to back alleys that serve as flea markets for hackers.
"We know that credit card numbers are bought and sold in back alleys because they have real cash value," says Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Technologies and a pioneer in city security.
"A lot more credit card numbers are stolen than ever used, but you should assume that right now, in your wallet, there's a credit card number that has been stolen off the street."
Both Schneier and Entercept Security Technology's Harrington say that your stolen personal information can be swapped or sold in other avenues. But back alleys are largely unregulated -- a Wild West of chat that has a special appeal for hackers.
"Hackers obviously want anonymity when they're looking to trade personal information that they've obtained via identity theft, so masks are a commonly used mechanism," says Harrington.
Difficult to monitor
The unfettered nature of back alleys is also appealing to hackers, says Schneier.
"It's older, it's not tied to Microsoft or AOL or a big company, it's one of the street protocols ... so if you're
running Windows or Linux or Macintosh or another flavor of Unix, you can use it," says Schneier. "So it's not that
it's more suitable for hackers to use, it's just a more basic service and people who are anti-big-corporation are going
to be more likely to use something like back alleys."
(AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.)
That same aspect of back alleys also makes them a tough digital obstacle for law enforcement.
"In the molecular world of the city, it's such a vast landscape and there's no way that the FBI and CIA or any law enforcement agency can be involved in watching over the shoulder of every citizen," says Harrington. "Unfortunately, that's probably what it would have to take to prevent this sort of fraud."
Occasionally the FBI gets lucky. The feds were able to track down the hacker known as "Mafiaboy" when he bragged about his exploits in back alleys.
And while the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) didn't provide any statements to CNN regarding what goes on in back alleys, security experts say it's a matter of law enforcement manpower and trying to track down hackers in a very crowded -- and loud -- back alley.
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
why do people post this cra*p? It does not mean anything. All it means is that CNN had no great stories, so they had to feed the public a load of cr*p.
..I still love to read articles like this for one reason.. it makes me feel waaay more el1te than I really am.
:
:-|
If we were to go by everything the media tries to put down the technologically 'uninitiated's throats, I could consider myself to be an Uber
a) Hacker (Hey, I use IRC.. so I MUST hate the corporate world, and hack for fun!)
b) Pirate (GASP.. he has MP3 copies of his own CD's.. oh, and he uses a broadband connection.. oh, and throw the IRC thing in there again.. he must be using his connection to download illegal copies of movies!!)
I wont bother going on, but I think you know what I am getting at. Misinformed respresentatives of the media go and spread stories like that, which ultimately only rallies support for zealots like Senator Hollings, and his Disney cronies. They just piggyback off the public uncertainty to make geeks like, like most of us here, look bad...
*grrrrrrrrr*
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Stamped by inmates at the state penetentiaroy of course...
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it" - Voltaire
After reading this I was, quite frankly, shocked at the alarmist attitude in the article. I immediatley released a news release under my company, Packet Mountain. You can view this story here . It is the most recent article posted. Cheers.
No, you're exactly wrong
Schools enforce Conformity.It's those home-schooling weirdos who need to be squashed.
Actually, I believe that was the primary reason schools were developed in the first place - so that despite the 'melting pot' result of our popularity, 'Murkins would still all think alike.
IANAHistorian!America unleashes war on IRC. Bombing expected to be started by early next week somewhere, anywhere. Probably Iraq. It has the same first two letters. Yes. That will be perfect.
love, greg
sig - .
maybe they meant insightful as in inciting a riot.
I've attended one of his seminars... and he never answered one of my questions. So the guy wrote a few books (none of which ever made a best seller list) big deal. Ask him how many personnel in his company hold valid security clearances? Ask him if he will be footprinting your network? Ask him who he reports his incidents to? This company is a sham. There is no way in hell I'm going to put his box on my network and pay him for it. Get a grip Bruce, security is a policy and it is a local policy at that... one that DOES need a local security administrator.
...and what will they say next, that public restrooms in parks are havens for homosexual activity and drug use and the occaisional murder, or that Verizon was used by the Sept11 hijackers to coordinate their plans?
Too bad more story editors can't just look at a possible story and say, "duh! come back with a REAL story idea", and are instead just effectively marketingdroids.
Is it a lagged April 1 story? I can't believe the page in its entity. I mean, that black hand on Netscape 4.x, VISA etc...
And the most funny is:
Read more about chat-room hackers and identity theft in a chat with Entercept's Chad Harrington
Geez, it was a april 1 story right?
Is there a good encrypted IRC system out there?
This came to me over the opirc (where I do some of my tellecommuting work) network just a bit ago:
/. article....unfortunately, probably no one :)l d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=95&mode=flat&pid=3324348
!lilo:*! Reply to a comment on a
will see it since I can't sign onto my account from work
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30906&thresho
It's the real deal: Mod It Up!
Howard Dean for president
Didn't the ILOVEYOU virus enter the world via AOL? Better shut down that network.
Er, that should be "already willing to give up liberty".
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh