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.

Comments

IRC analysis fatally flawed

[IO ERROR]

Sure, maybe by bandwidth, 99% of IRC traffic is illegal. Aside from the binary file transfers themselves, I'd say probably 99% of all remaining IRC traffic (i.e. in-channel) is perfectly legal.

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.

Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

Binaries (if you mean warez packaged in nicely formatted rars or isos) don't get sent over IRC. They use DCC.

Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed

[Drakonite]

You'd need a study of how many channels are warez channels, or what percentage of users were in warez channels.

Warez channels tend to be huge, so no surprise it'd be easy for them to make the top 60.. But what if there are 10 times as many legit channels, but they only average half as many users per channel. Now we've suddenly gone from 99% to 20%...

On that same note you need to figure in how many users are being counted more than once by being in more than one warez channel. Perhaps it's different on other networks, but people that come into channels I op in that have warez channels in their whois list tend to have a dozen or more warez channels listed, while those in only legit channels usually have 3 or less.

Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed

[NevermindPhreak]

i think this persons "study" was just based on how many times someone said something that seemed to be "illegal" or "legal" based on keywords in what they have to say. of course, the top 60 channels are warez channels, because warez channels tend to be as large as possible (1000+ users). when is the last time youve had a conversation with 1000 of your closest friends?

people just sit idle in warez channels, letting bots run, stuff like that. if this study used the smallest 60 channels, i think the results would be the opposite. its like judging the crime rate of the entire nation by taking the average of the largest several cities.

Nice reading there, CowboyNeal

[Turmio]

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.

In other news...

[Pizaz]

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?

Has to be said

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Ever been to bash? That's what IRC is, there just happens to be alot of warez servers out there too.

http://bash.org/

Word Analysis

[tiny69]

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.

And then some!

[violet16]

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.

Don't Fall For This Trick!

[ThisIsFred]

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).