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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?
Ah, IRC, where men are men, women are men, and 14-year old girls are FBI agents.
Yeah, I buy 99%, although the last time I logged on it was for help with my Slackware box.
If nothing else, IRC has given us bash.org.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
...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)
99.9% is an entirely sensationalized number. It means nothing. If you actually read through, he's claiming 99.9% of the top 60 public channels on IRC are largely illegal behavior. That's not 99.9% of IRC. The warez related channels are large, and there are many people who use IRC just for that. But there are many people who actually use IRC for the purpose it was intended, to chat.
I'm an oper on efnet, so I'm well aware of the fact illegal activity goes on on IRC. Depending on the illegal activity, we can and do take action. We regularly remove drone runners, hacked bots (drones or XDCC), spammers, and other malicious users. Do we actively pursue copyright infringers? Not generally. Besides the fact there's simply too many of them, they're generally not harming our network or each other so they're a low priority.
Me? I use IRC for chat primarily, and most people I know do the same.
I'm a bit short on cash, i'll just download your book (linked from the article) from IRC.
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.
IRC is just multiplayer notepad...
Duh?
Most people use IM now, so there's less need for the casual user to read the following:
captnitro: hey whats goin on
ice8229: no fuck that
captnitro: what?
peebles: your mother is a whore, you know it
ice8229: i'm not going to buy a goddamn program just to rip
ice8229: anybody know of an open one?
fisher0: i kno cuz i fuckerd her d00d
captnitro: what the hell is going on here?
adbot: MP3Z MOVIEZ WAREZ BAGELZ go to 62.182.100.10
binaryman: 1000100011110101
captnitro: huh?
binaryman: 1001111010111110
sharky: get out n00b
fisher0: i am not a virgin i so fskced her! in the ears
pornking: anybody want to cyber?
10yearold: yes
Clearly the domain of kings.
He goes searching for warez (using four keywords related to popular software) and when he finds it he declares 99.9% of IRC usage is illegal? What about the linux support, gaming forums, etc... and there have to still be people that use IRC for plain old chat. I think these numbers are a bit misleading.
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?
Slashdot - the geek's Weekly World News!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
This is interesting, if not completely scientific.
First of all, the author asserts, "Based on [statistics extrapolated from the arbitrary] keywords being monitored, 99.9% of IRC traffic to the top 60 channels is "illegal"
Which is arbitrary but interesting. I bet he might get different statistics if he monitored keywords unrelated to popular software programs. Or if non "top 60 channels" were monitored. Or if some more specific traffic-based analysis was carried out (cut messages by bots, etc).
Secondly, and this is a place where he doesn't go, is IRC an encourager of illegal activity or just an outlet for it (i.e. if all IRC servers quit today, would all the illegal activity just shift to other parts of the 'net?)-- it's probably somewhere in the middle, but where, exactly? In other words, what does his study imply?
I'd love to see more analysis on this.
Where I work uses IRC for internal communications. Channels for support, engineering, sales, etc. We'd go nuts without it.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
(Seriously, though... PSP is in the top four requests? Really?)
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
a private place for friends to chat and idle. If wetake MSN for example the percentage of bandwidth going to file transfering is going to be massaive compared to text messages. Think of it this way.
1 message = 1-10kb
1 movie file = 900mb (30 minutes = 200 mb so I'm assuming a movie is about that)
Now then, I have to sent 1024 messages to make 1/900 or 1/90 of that same thing. So any way you look at it, you will still end up with "broadband is faster then my fingers."
IRC is just free speech in a free place, it can be abused just as any where else can. I'm sure theres alot of child pornography on IRC, but I'm also sure theres alot of it being handed to "clients" in McDonalds and coffee shops. It's how the world works, only it's hidden better in that case.
I like muppets.
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...
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)
IRC also works as a great source of entertainment without being illegal as shown at http://bash.org/
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"
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.
Is everybody forgetting the instant help people get from IRC channels? Look around. You've got official IRC channels for almost every distro of Linux. Got a problem? Pop in and ask a question. There will almost always be someone there to help you.
I idle on an IRC network where I've known the members for several years now. Yes, I will probably never meet them in real, but you have a sense of community. Is it illegal to have a sense of community?
By and large, the media has never heard of IRC.
No kidding. Mention this to someone who has been on the Internet a few times and they're liking to say:
"I recall correctly?"
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
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
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.
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)
If the files themselves are not transfered over IRC, then how are any of the discussions illegal? I the address off a copyrighted file illegal?
A&M Records v. Napster should help you find your own answer to that question.
When a nice 44 year old gentleman helping a troubled 14 year old girl regain her self confidence is "illegal".
paintball
I work as a systems engineer for a large internet service provider in western pa, and I use IRC everyday to chat to co-workers and other admins / engineers for various ISP's all around the country. Ever have a problem with a radius box that you're using to do dial-up authentication? IRC is just about the only place left that you can find people who'll know what the hell your talking about... It's a great place to bounce ideas off of other like-minded / like-employeed people. The other day for example I talked who just took over abuse duties for an ISP in Canada, shared some of my tips and tricks...
So 99% of IRC traffic is bad? Maybe the bandwidth, because text doesn't use much at all... But I would argue there are many that are using it for legit purposes!
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.
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
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
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.
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!
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.
The first time I user IRC on the VAX/VMS in 1989, I ended up talking to a young man in Berlin who told me the Berlin Wall was going to come down three days before CNN knew about it.
Every spare minute I had between class, I spent asking what he thought would happen, heard he was scared because the doubts of what would happen next and felt REAL glad I stumbled on IRC while most everyone else was using it to try and scam a date.
Knowing that something like this tool was able to bring people together across the world for such a world changing event just made me feel unbelievably privileged.
And I beat CNN with the news. Thanksgiving just meant more that year.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Hihi
On friday/saturday nights I run a karaoke show where I stream video live over the internet
I just stretch a bx client across the bottom of the screen, and let folks on the net hang out in a chatroom. What they say in the chatroom, goes up on the screen right below the lyrics for the singers to read.
Sometimes we get jerks in there. Our #1 rule is no heckling the singers. We figure it takes guts to get up on stage and sing in front of the world, so we try to take care of our singers.
Luckily, I have a lot of good people watching it for me. The occasional bad comment slips through, but part of the fun is in the banning.
No warez, none of that junk. Just a cool place.
irc.landoleet.org #karaoke
www.7bamboo.com
I've been using IRC since 96 and I have quite a circle of friends who I keep in contact with over IRC on private channels. From my home town of 8000 there are around 800 IRC users who just use IRC to keep in touch and find out where the party is at, etc...
/list or in a /whois. The only way you could gather stats on these users is to sniff the traffic of the server. The legit chat channels are usually +s because you don't want to be overrun by newbies or 1337 kiddies.
It's also use it for illegal stuff too, like finding weed... (Most people already know who they are dealing with)
Most of the legit chat is going on in private channels that a circle of friends inhabit that will never show up on
MSN has put a big dent in the number of new IRCers, a few years ago IRC was growing big time but then people started to switch to MSN and the newbies followed likeing the simpler(?) interface.
Warez, MP3's and movies have moved off IRC for the most part and onto the p2p networks for the masses. Its only a few 1000 kids left running xdcc bots and fservs. Then you have the release groups who you will never meet on IRC unless you know someone. I'd have to guess there are a few IRC servers only accessable over SSH where the real big shit is going down.
God, root, what is the difference?
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
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.
.
That wouldn't get him a Doctorate at Hamburger U. :P
Really, this article makes me mad. Big time.
I have met too many cool people through IRC who have become real life buddies to see IRC as what this dumbass says it is. I know for a fact IRC has saved one life that I know of...one of my chat buddies sent a suicide note via email and between the rest of the regulars in the channel I was a regular on we were able to get paramedics from her town there at her doorstep in time to save her.
Note well: I abandoned EFNet, Undernet and DALnet a long time ago, when they became almost unusable. There are little networks around now where the *real* IRC lives. You probably don't know them, and that's OK...they'd rather be left alone, far from the crapflooders and the warez kiddies and the skript kiddies and the rest of the miscellaneous lamers who make the big nets a living hell. They'd rather be hanging out in cyberspace together in their little cybernetic communities.
I suppose of the big nets freenode.net is still quite friendly. I suggest if you are associated with a LUG get your feet wet in your LUG's chat channel.
IRC used to be fun. It still is when it's among friends. I suppose it's the tragedy of the commons. Let too many people loose in one place and the worst comes out.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The chatroom usually has around 100-150 people, except for when the The Screen Savers is taped live every day at 4PM PST where the room spikes at 300-400 people. Users in the chatroom interact with the hosts on live TV and the live show incorporate user comments from the channel.
I'd say we definitely make good use, legal and positive, of IRC!
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.
That's like listening to the top 60 most-hyped RIAA "artists" and concluding that 99.9% of all music in the world sucks.
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
From the article:
This is misleading nonsense because IRC is a protocol, not a community. There are hundreds or thousands of IRC networks out there, including a few big ones. IRC is a number of big cities plus lots of small towns. I happen to frequent this nice small town where people are mostly friendly, children are welcome, and warez and sex channels are forbidden (this is enforced). Just goes to show that the article is one big misleading generalization with sensationalism as its only purpose.
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.
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.