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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?
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.
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?
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.
You're so far off the mark... I've been chatting on irc for 8 years now... i've made some good friends, and i still continue to talk to them on a daily basis. As far as I can tell warez kidz are not even close to the majority of the irc population. It's like what one of the first posters said.. if you're looking for the warez, you'll find it, and you won't find much of anything else...
so your viewpoint depends on what YOU use it for i guess..
You're nothing; like me.
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
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)
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.
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
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.