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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.
Actually I read the article, and he says that "99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is 'illegal.'" Which doesn't surprise me; all 60 of them are warez channels. But overall, this is a drop in the IRC ocean.
There is far too much legal conversation going on that he completely ignored in this study, choosing to focus on the top 60 warez channels to the exclusion of all else. Is it any wonder he found what he found? If you go looking for warez, you're probably going to find warez.
In other words, this is a bunch of lies, damn lies and statistics. I didn't even have to think hard about this one to realize it's a bunch of bullshit.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
By and large, the media has never heard of IRC.
...not that we should really be surprised. IRC has become less of a community with the chatrooms/instant messaging clients that exist now. In the past, it was a social activity. Now it's just a convenient way to trade warez :)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
His conclusions are quite alarming, suggesting that 99.9% of IRC usage is illegal
From TFA: Based on those keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is "illegal".
Clearly, (all) IRC usage != IRC traffic to the top 60 channels.
What internet protocol doesnt have a high percentage of illegal activity? HTTP to get to the warez sites, FTP to download from them, IRC to get them off other jackasses, SMTP to send unsolicited e-mail. P2P "protocols" ...
Too many idiots are out here in cyberspace.
Skimming the article, obviously he counted Fserve ads and Xdcc ads. Each one of these, one every ten minutes or so, ads up most mightilly, but does not necesarrily mean that people are more interested in them by the huge margin that he comes up with (although I do think they do account for more). Just because I have a script that says "Free windows XP Pro Corp, Jasc, Norton systemworks type !DJ245" every 600 seconds doesn't mean that it is accounting for the vast majority of use of IRC. Traffic, probably. Bandwidth, most likely. But hours of time spend in front of a keyboard using IRC- most definitely not.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
This just in over the wires, everywhere is reporting that planet Earth is a haven for illegal activities. Without exception, in every town of every province of every country, earthlings are violating (where applicable)local, state and federal laws. In conclusion, people cannot be trusted and Martial Law must be declared!
O' Big Brother, where art thou?
Obviously any channel which has 1000 users on it isn't going to have much conversation going on. Unlike a cocktail party where 1000 people can congregate and have 200 different conversations simultaniously with 4-6 people per conversation, an irc channel with 1000 people is more like an auditorium where only a few people can talk at a time (usually one). This is hardly what you would call "chat".
How we know is more important than what we know.
A search for words that are more likely than not connected to warez returns 99.9% illegal activity? I wonder what percentage of the word "dumbass" turns up something illegal...
Quick summary: the author of the article monitored occurance of four keywords: "Norton", "Microsoft", "Symantec" and "Jasc" and found that over 99.9% of the contexts in which they were used referred to illegal file sharing.
Among those who use IRC for other purposes (general chatting, collaboration), how many of them talk about the above companies? If the author had monitored the occurance of the words "linux" or even "c++" or "java" there would be many more "legal" contexts.
I think the number 99.9% is worthless as a measurement.
99.9% of what? Alcoholics Anonymous' IRC meetings? The Linux channel? The Star Trek channel?
Most of the other channels are sex lines. Sure, there's probably illegal stuff going on in some, but it's mostly people pretending to have a social life.
99.9% of what's left, after you get rid of all that, is probably illegal. I'll accept that. It's just not a very useful figure, at that point.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ever been to bash? That's what IRC is, there just happens to be alot of warez servers out there too.
http://bash.org/
I like muppets.
Very correct, 99.9% is sensationalized and made up. With a sampling of 60 channels, either 1 channel could be non-warez and it would be 100% - 1/60 % = 99.833. . .% , or all would be warez related and it would 100%. This guy may want to use accurate math (not round up from 3) if he is doing a Ph.D. thesis.
-Mr. Nit picky
IRC: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Actually to be honest, I've taken to calling it the "wastelands". If there is something I want, its google first. Bittorrent second. Kazaa-lite third. If all that fails, then its IRC. Usually if I get to that point, I'd rather give up before treking through that sludge.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I've hung out in the same room probably since 97 or so, and have gotten pretty close with some of the people who have been there as long as I. Its a linux room, so theres not warez trading, just good conversation, a few lunatics, and some canadians. irc.geeksanon.ca #alt.linux if you want to check it out.
He monitored 60 channels for 36 hours for only 4 words - Norton, Symantec, Jasc, and Microsoft.
He then determines that out of 10588 instances of those words, they were only used 10 times legally. Based on this, he concludes that 99.9% of all IRC traffic is illegal. But he doesn't define what is illegal (other then mention that he's monitoring for warez). He doesn't mention what percentage of these "key words" were in relation to the rest of the conversations. He also doesn't take into account what percentage of the traffic these 60 channels make up out of all of the IRC traffic.
And this study was for his Ph.D. thesis. I really hope he fails. We don't need Ph.D's that come to wild conclusions based off of the poor analysis of data.
As someone else mentioned, he went looking for warez and found it.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Not everyone uses IRC for illegal things. Let me give some great examples of why I use IRC and the advantages I see:
1. FreeMatrix radio chat for the radio shows
2. No lame fonts and other stupid things like sound effects - easy to strip out the colors too from the AOL newbies who don't realize how rude it is
3. No bulky chat clients. Can IRC using only a text based interface if I want to, or even mIRC or the java chat client I have on my website
4. Ignore, kick, ban, kline, gline, need I say more?
5. Ability to communicate with alot of the people I work with who normally I can't get in touch with due to distance or expense.
Theres ALOT of good things going on IRC if you take the time and look. But of course, the GOOD things on IRC wouldn't make for a very interesting or popular story would it?
Brielle
I can just see some moron waving a statistic like this around congress... that's all we need. It's hard to enough to explain things when we have accurate information. It's a nightmare when dealing with this kind of hackneyed nonsense.
From the article, all he found is that most of the time Microsoft, Norton, Symantec, and Jasc are mentioned in 60 particular IRC channels, it's in relation to illegally downloading their products.
He didn't look at the vast majority of IRC channels, and of those he did, he didn't consider the vast majority of the traffic within them -- just those four words. Additionally, he failed to observe any distinction between engaging in an illegal activity and simply mentioning it.
This is a bit like visiting the 60 largest train stations, measuring how many times the word "score" is used in relation to illegal activity, and concluding that 99.9% of the world's public transport users are drug trafficking.
I should buy some cement.
My conclusions are quite alarming, suggesting that 99.9% of Slashdot story summaries are retardedly inaccurate.
Don't fall for this trick! The folks conducting the study had a hunch, and looked for the specific metric that would make their case. The case being that IRC is worthless because it's mostly used for illegal activities.
Obviously large file transfers are going to consume more bandwidth than casual chatting. But what about other metrics? How about if they counted the number of human users on IRC performing illegal activities versus those users that are just there to communicate? How about if it counted the number of connected hours used for legal communication as opposed to number of connected hours used to initiate DCC transfers (not monitored or controlled by IRC ops) of illegally copied material? My guess is that the study would show the opposite result.
It's just like the old statistic that airline travel is the safest. You'll hear that quoted a lot, but no one ever mentions the metric. It just so happens the metric is "safest per mile traveled." An airliner designed to go long distances at 550 mph obviously has the advantage here. Compare it by number of individual trips or hours spent traveling, and it turns out that the chance of fatality is about the same (or more).
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Mr. Mutton didn't bother to pick 60 channels at random. Instead he carefully selected the 60 most popular channels. Most likely, those channels were saturated with warez bots which is why they were so popular [1].
But such a biased sample wasn't enough for Mr. Mutton. He had to bias his sample even further. Instead of picking traffic out of the channels at random, he carefully chose four keywords likely to be associated with warez. He then sampled the conversations involving those keywords.
Mr. Mutton may have developed an efficient technique for finding warez on IRC, but he certainly hasn't conducted his study in a manner to generalize his results to IRC "is a haven for warez and trojans."
All the author has discovered is that when you pick channels saturated with bots and listen for keywords related to popular, easily copied commercial products, you have a good chance of finding discussion of illegal activity (he didn't even confirm that the activity was occurring).
---
[1] The author says: "There does not appear to be any need to offer anything in return, which has to make you wonder why the hackers are doing this."
To which I respond, when someone conducts illegal activity it is easier to hide in a crowd. If the authorities get involved, the risk of prosecution is split amongst more users. This of course, further explains why illegal activity would center on large channels and why the 'hackers' would make themselves look like one of the hundreds of bots.
So he goes into warez channels and concludes that they're used for illegal stuff. Well, gee, ain't that a surprise. (Sarcasm there.)
So it's not just like doing a crime-rate study on the 10 largest city. It's like doing a study on the 10 largest _prisons_ and concluding that 99.9% of them are criminals (or at least have commited at least one major crime in their lifetime), hence the whole country is a country of criminals.
Or it's like doing a web study based on Slashdot and concluding that world-wide 99% of the people are computer-savvy nerds, and that Linux is the most popular OS world-wide, more used than MS Windows and MacOS/X combined by an order of magnitude.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't think your diagnosis of having "post traumatic stress disorder" was from the crazy content you found on IRC. It's the fact you spent far too much time on it. You state you've been using it for about eight years, and spend 18 hours a day, and then crawl to bed which is only 2 feet away.
This is akin to a story where a Korean man at an internet cafe DIED from just sitting at a PC for over a week, playing an online game for FAR too long. Only getting up to use the bathroom, and never sleeping. THAT is sick. However he wasn't sick from the content on his screen.
Please don't try to imply that all of the conversations you had and messages you read from IRC is what caused your disorder that was diagnosed, and you're still dealing with.
The truth is you spent to much time at the computer, which is what got you sick.
-FRAGaLOT
Further, this tells more about you than about the overall "population" of Undernet. You've self-selected who you got in contact with by your choice of channels, by your choice of nick, and by choosing who you talk to. It's perfectly possible to find civilised and "normal" conversations on Undernet, as on most IRC networks. But contrary to the physical world where people with unconvential or perverse fantasies are to a certain extent forced to hide their fantasies, anonymous networks gives them a chance to explore in the open - as a result, if you look you most likely will find.
Another point you need to realise, is that allthough there are many truly disturbed people out there, there's also a great many that just enjoy playing out roles that they in many cases would never dream of living out for real. A significant part of the "nutcases" you've run into on IRC have probably been laughing their ass off from having gotten you to believe what they're writing.