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

Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed

[Cracell]

no way, so chatting takes less bandwidth then downloading junk? no way, ya gotta be lying once again we see reports from idiots, about things they don't understand, feels kinda like Washington

Is IRC all bad?

[petrus4]

IRC in itself is merely a protocol. Just as a gun in itself isn't inherently good or bad, but rather the person who fires it, the same can be said of IRC. However...

I spent close to eight years (September 1995 to July 2003) inhabiting IRC, primarily on the Undernet network, but also DALnet as well. For most of that time, I literally spent all of my waking hours on IRC...My bed was located about two feet behind the computer, and I would get up, sign on...and sixteen-eighteen hours later, sign off, and lie down.

In my experience, the Undernet in particular exists primarily (as does Usenet) as a haven for the socially disenfranchised, chronically mentally ill...it is literally a human rubbish tip, and is the closest thing in physical existence that I have known to the concept of Catholic concept of Purgatory...not even so much in the level of torment that exists there, but more because it exists mainly as a gathering point for those who, because of mental disease and deformity or extreme sexual deviancy and perversion, are unable to associate with the rest of the offline human population. In short, quoting the words of Egon Spengler from the Real Ghostbusters, "This is where the worst ghosts of the lot get stuck, because they're too awful for anyone to see." Outside of the institutionalised mental health or penal systems, I can with confidence state that in Western society, IRC is as bad as it gets.

During my time on the network, I literally encountered examples of virtually every psychiatric disease or ailment known to man. I knew paranoid and hallucinatory schizophrenics/schizotypals, people with MPD, OCD, and nymphomania, various forms of autism, extreme drug addiction, and nihilistic and perverted occultism related interests.

As far as sexual deviancy is concerned, DALnet is probably worse than the Undernet, but there again, I was privy to learning about the existence of a huge number of different forms of dysfunctional sexuality...Paedophilia, beastiality, scatology, BDSM, various types of oral fixations, group sex, fetishism is countless other different forms, transsexuality, etc etc. It had an enormous, and extremely detrimental psychological effect on me, which two years later I am still attempting to recover from. I have also had a formal diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder due to my experiences.

I personally believe that the Internet is one of the single most positive...bordering on miraculous...inventions in human history that I know of. However, with that said, there are parts of it that urgently need to be avoided. If parents are worried about their children using the net, the Web to a large degree can be ok, as is MSN...but when it comes to Usenet and IRC in particular, their concern is justified.

I know it will never happen, but my fondest wish would be for the global psychiatric community to mobilise and send some of its members into a number of channels on the Undernet...#scripture, #submission, and #thelema probably primarily among them. Those channels contain extremely sick, damaged people...who need help.

It's easy to be confused by what he wrote.

[twitter]

He's updated his page with a nasty little insult to those who he should be thanking if he cares about reasonable representation of IRC:

In response to those Slashdot readers who obviously didn't bother to read this article properly: ... It seems reasonable to assume that a journalist researching IRC for the first time would be more inclined to visit one of the larger channels, and thus be more likely to conclude that it is all about illegal file sharing. This is one of the reasons why IRC gets an unfair bad press. That's what this article was trying to show, in a roundabout way. There are no "lies" or "bullshit" in this article, just people who can't read and interpret things sensibly for themselves.

Nice of him to be direct but we can be sure that journalists, who thrive on controversy, will be fed the following quote from him 99.9% of the time:

[IRC] is a haven for warez and trojans. ... 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is "illegal".

That's out of context, but the important contexts are missing from his article too. While the update bemoans the fact that "Slashdot readers" are apt to be confused and enraged by what he says, he does not include these important facts and explanations:

1. An automated advertisement of cracked software is not equivalent to a download of the software.
2. Bots are minority usage. There are many orders of magnitude more smaller channels than there are large channels.
3. The only reason to visit a larger channel would be to find warez because it's impossible to have a conversation with 100 people, let alone 1000.
4. Bots are a serious problem and are used to disrupt legitimate conversation.

In short, IRC usage is much like the rest of the world. The vast majority of activity is legitimate but a minority are making it difficult for everyone.

It's silly to characterize things the way he did. Unless the author notes and includes some of the better judgment exhibited by the people he's insulting, he's not doing IRC any favor.