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Is IRC All Bad?
An anonymous reader writes "IRC is often portrayed by the media as a haven for illegal activity. The author of IRC Hacks set out to find whether or not this was true. His conclusions are quite alarming, suggesting that 99.9% of IRC usage is illegal although he backs up IRC by saying that it is also used for lots of constructive purposes and is used by open source software developers." Update: 01/21 05:17 GMT by P : The author claimed it was merely 99.9% of traffic "to the top 60 channels" that is illegal, not 99.9% of all IRC traffic.
Last time I logged on to IRC (network: irc.gamesurge.net) was to chat with the populace in #gamesurge, as well as to have a battledice match in #battledice. Nothing illegal there.
For the slashdot populace:
[KBC] brb, i think i heard a girl say "desperate" about 3 miles away
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
I think a clarification is in order. The author states that he monitored the top 60 channels and of those 60 99.9% of that traffic was illegal.
"Conclusions Two rather surprising observations can be made from this ad-hoc analysis of the 60 largest IRC channels: Based on those keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is "illegal". Norton products are more popular than Microsoft products (perhaps IRC users have more need for virus scanners?)
Which is definitely not the same as saying 99.9% of "all" irc traffic is illegal. Which the story leader tends to imply. As we know there's a whole lot more than 60 channels available and many of them engage in perfectly legal activities.
Romana: "How did you know?" Doctor Who: "Ah, well, knowing is easy. Everyone does THAT ad nauseum. I just sort of hope"
analysis, and conclusions. First off i will agree that most if not all of IRC traffic is illegal. Secondly i will note that monitoring four words in 6 channels on the top 10 IRC networks, is not a good sample to base conclusions on. I will also point out that most, if not all, of the really "illegal" channels are not on the big networks, and are rarely public. This Kazaa of places he found are just the tip of the iceberg. The IRC channels are really just a front for a much larger problem. Here's how it works: People run these IRC "warez" channels basically as recruiting places. They offer lots of content, but what they are really are looking for is suppliers. There is a sort of bartering system in place on IRC. If you have access to some unreleased item or can provide bandwidth you get recruited. Once you get recruited, you get showered in free stuff. As long as you keep producing, you keep getting. The bots are really just a bait tactic to recruit new people. Sure the bottom feeders like them, but that's really superfluous. I could go on to explain curriers, dumps, and ratios, but that's another discussion. During my younger days I often traveled in these dark underground arenas. Fortunately, I moved on. The point i'm trying to make is that most IRC traffic is illegal by volume, but IRC has plenty of other great uses. There is no real way to analyze the exact ratio or amount that is illegal.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
In addition to the parents arguments, when a 5mb binary is sent across the lines (typical song in mp3 format) it far outweighs the bandwith used by a 24 hour chat session. If most file swaps on IRC are unauthorised then I'll buy that statistic. If 99% of users on IRC are claimed to be doing illegal things, then I've got to call bullshit (totaly in agreement with the parent.)
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I have to agree with the parent. Some of the most insightful and helpful people I've met are on IRC at the randomest of hours.
I've even found professional job headhunters online looking for talent in certain rooms. Thats pretty cool actually.
I think IRC still retains a good deal of an entrance barrier (in the way of either knowing it exists or how to get on something that's not on the "internet explorer" (web)) and thus remains the grounds of the computer semi-skilled at the least.
They use DCC.
nevertheless, you are still using IRC to search, even though the connection is direct and not over the server.
what he probably wanted to say was
"99% of all remaining IRC usage" rather than transfer
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
I'm an admin on the GameSurge IRC network (irc.gamesurge.net). I can't really say much about the other networks, but on GameSurge at least, we don't permit warez distribution, among other illegal activities. Our 6 largest channels are for finding games to play, clan channels, or IRC games -- none of these activities are illegal.
So at the very least, that means that 10% of the channels he looked at aren't used for illegal purposes (presumably he used something like netsplit.de to determine the 10 largest networks, so we'd be in that list).
I seem to recall that DAL changed their policies to disallow file-sharing channels a while ago. If they're enforcing that, there goes another 10%. A quick glance on netsplit.de shows that the biggest QuakeNet channels aren't for warez either. I didn't check the other networks, but there's probably a couple more that are clean.
I'll admit it's likely that the biggest channels on some of the other networks will be like he writes, but surely not 99.9%. Less than 70% even!
This entire post is like flamebait for some of us.
I've been an oper on DALnet for six years now, and I currently lead up their coding team, so allow me to shed some light on this - assuming this makes me qualified.
The top 60 channels. Who goes to huge channels to chat? Ever tried talking in a channel with 20 active users? Try 800 active users. Nobody goes to large channels to chat, its pointless to even try. The folks that join these channels join looking for something specific, or to offer something. They find what they are looking for, and move on.
On DALnet, we've taken agressive action against warez, child porn, and drones. Drones are unfortunately the only item that I can speak on authoritively - we reject about 300 drones per second on any given server on our network. This is done through pattern matching in their registration. Drones is a serious problem on any network. A while back (five years or so), dianora of efnet did some drone hunting, and concluded that around 60% of "users" on irc were accually drones - hacked end-user computers. Drones are a far worse problem than people realize.
A few years ago, DALnet was seriously DDOS'd - we went from the top network in the world (around 140,000) to next to nothing. Our servers sometimes got hit with DDOS attacks in the range of 60 Gigabits per second. We shut down major providers, rendered entire datacenters useless, and obviously lost servers quickly. We've since changed our routing methods to rely heavily on anycast, and changed a lot of other things.
In my mind, DALnet is one of the networks that accually has one of the lowest noise ratios around. Quakenet, the current leader in usercount, raises questions with me. Their usercount rose very fast, and I wonder about their userbase. I personally know only -one- person who uses quakenet. You mention DALnet, Undernet or EFnet and people identify much more readily. Even more people use small IRC networks with 50-500 users.
99.9% for illegal purposes - bullshit. If you go to irc only to look for warez, then I think you are in the minority. I'd put illegal purposes around 5% at best. And that means real, live people at the keyboard, looking for illegal material.
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Yes, this is an extreme example of how NOT to conduct a study. He started by chosing the 60 most popular channels - by definition they were not typical. There are 50,000 channels on undernet alone with an average of about 3 users each. Then he chose 4 keywords that are likely to be used much more for warez than legitimate conversation. The results would have been very different if the channels and keywords had been chosen randomly. Of course, if he had chosen a small number of keywords randomly, the results would probably have been 0.00% illegal traffic since the vast majority of the words used on IRC don't name products that are pirated, so the approach of examining the relative rates of legal and illegal use of particular keywords is itself flawed even if your choice of keywords isn't. Relative frequency of many different keywords in some cases could give some clues though there are statistical problems with this. "ROFLMAO" is more likely to be found in legitimate messages whereas "systemworks" is more likely to be found in piracy or SPAM (though it can occur in many legitimate contexts as well). A bayesian filter that looked at ALL keywords could have been used to separate the legal from illegal traffic after extensive training and used to extend the study over more messages and channels than could be done by hand.
And of course, his statistics (or even much better ones) won't tell you if, for example, 37% of the bots offering downloads are run by BSA, RIAA, and MPAA so they can collect IP addresses of pirates and 87% of the download requests are dummy requests they generate to make it look like everyone is doing it (to make it look like it is safe to download so they can entrap people as well as inflating statistics they can trot out later).
My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies.
Oh, I thought it was sponsored by viewers like you.
a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me.
While it's true that few people would enjoy ripping karaoke versions of Garth Brooks for their IPods, it certainly isn't legal parody.
b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's?
Absolutely! But that money goes to a different set of agencies, primarily Harry Fox.
c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?
That's an ambiguous statement. You might've meant that your singers are volunteers who give permission to stream their singing, but there's still the instrumental track you're infringing on. Those instrumentals may or may not be by the first people to publish that song, but even cover bands are original in some respect. (A first generation copy is "more original" than ones copied from it, etc)
As to why the big-name performers get more money than the band who actually made the karaoke CDs, that's a valid objection. It's really just a matter of bookkeeping overhead- it would be too hard for you to submit a list of all songs you've streamed over the year, so they just average it out and assume your playlist mirrors the Billboard 200. For more info, jwz wrote a complete article. (It's on webcasting, which you're still doing, even though you overlay other peoples' vocals)
I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this.
There is no such thing as "legality through obscurity". Sure, the rareness of the activity means you are unlikely to be the target of a lawsuit, but it doesn't mean you can honestly describe your site as a "legal use" for statistical analysis of a protocol.
Then he uses this information to boldly say...
Of course he's going to get results like this, he's idling in large channels with thousands of people and bots spamming those keywords. For the rest of the channels (which I'm willing to bet is something around 80% of them), much less information is traveling through them (they may not necessarily be idle though). He completely disregards this information though! His analysis seems to be completely based on the frequency of the used keywords, Norton, Microsoft, Symantec, and Jasc; these were probably the most queried words in the warez channels, and renders an inaccurate depiction of the world of IRC.
A much better approach would have been to count the total number of messages his clients received, and sort them out by "illegal" and "legal" context; removing the number of repeat lines from the warez spam channels (usually from the bots), and you would be left with a much more realistic outlook.
The term would be most accurately a "Simple Majority" For other majorities see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority
The term is a Plurality, as in, the most votes in a 3+ person election.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
The article is ment as a joke, as it is now even mentioned in the article itself.
I know this is slashdot and that reading full articles isn't really what people do here, but "Hey slashdot readers. This is a joke about bad journalism." is actually the first thing you would see, if you read TFA.
Jeez, this is a none-case. Wisen up.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.