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Questionable Data Mining Concerns IRC Community
jessekeys writes "Two days ago an article on TechCrunch about IRSeeK revealed to the community that a service logs conversations of public IRC channels and put them into a public searchable database.
What is especially shocking for the community is that the logging bots are very hard to identify. They have human-like nicks, connect via anonymous Tor nodes and authenticate as mIRC clients. IRSeeK never asked for permission and violates the privacy terms of networks and users. A lot of chatters were deeply disturbed finding themselves on the search engine in logs which could date back to 2005.
As a result, Freenode, the largest FOSS IRC network in existence, immediately banned all tor connections while the community gathered and set up a public wiki page to share knowledge and news about IRSeeK. The demands are clear: remove all existing logs and stop covert operations in our channels and networks.
Right now, the IRSeeK search is unavailable as there are talks talking place with Freenode Staff."
When will Google buy them out?
Whatever IRSeek were doing was obviously highly important and very profitable, as no one noticed them for nearly two years...
and theres nothing wrong with bash.org though? sounds kinda hypocritical.
IRC is pretty much a shadow of its-self from the good old days of perhaps 10 years ago. Does anyone really even bother with it now? Between the scams/spam/abuse, why bother?
And no, I'm not trolling, i was there in the beginning, but watched it degenerate into a virtual cesspool years ago, and got out before it hit rock bottom. Has it improved?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Our nicks on IRC provide a level of anonymity, and we know that actual people do keep logs of us. Many of our quotes even end up on http://www.bash.org./ I go onto IRC knowing that my conversation is not necessarily private, and if I ever wanted to discuss private details of myself to someone on IRC, I could simple private message him. I could even set up a private room if I have to discuss private matters to a group of people. I don't know why I'd discuss private issues with those on IRC, but some people may for whatever reasons. It's silly to expect privacy on IRC. Never say anything in public that you don't want to come back at you. If anything, just set up a passworded channel if you're planning a violent revolution.
So what exactly makes an IRC network FOSS? Almost all the major networks have been publishing their code since their inception. Given that I've been part of the coding team for DALnet for the last seven years - and publishing Bahamut as GPL the entire time, saying that freenode is the "largest FOSS network"...
As a side note, DALnet has banned tor nodes quite a while ago, because of services abuse coming from those IP addresses.
.
If you're posting something on the internet, you should have the expectation that everyone in the whole world may someday know it was you who wrote it.
David Brin's essay on the end of privacy is probably appropriate reading here...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
So anonymity for individual people is a privacy right of the holiest nature, but anonymity for bots is bad because then you can't discriminate against them. Hmm.
As of 12:43pm EST, the search features of IRSeeK appeared to be down.
How many times has someone come into a linux channel asking for help when the same question was answered 5 minutes earlier. IRSeek will be a great resource for information. I haven't used IRC in a couple of years now but I remember all the channels that I actively participated in where set so they didn't appear in /list.
The three people who still use IRC are going to be *pissed!*
(Last time I used IRC was in an attempt to get support on a particular open source software package. Worst. Support. Ever. In a room with 50+ connected people, seemingly every single one was AFK for a solid 5 minutes. Of course when someone got back, they just told me I was in the wrong IRC room to ask that question, [you know, the one in the product's documentation!] and I was stupid for not knowing it. The other 49 AFK people never said a word, so I kind of wondered why the hell they even bothered to connect. Of course, maybe they were all secret IRC logging bots, heh.)
Comment of the year
So is it free or not free?
The privacy policy reads like a DRM license. Seriously. Your public chat is just that... public.
*Now* I see what the GPL controversy is all about. I wouldn't want my public speech to be released under policies as strict as those. Next thing you know, someone will be slamming Google or Yahoo! for offering cached versions of blogs.
Oh, wait...
oh the humanity! seriously folks, if its a public channel, why do you care? IRC has +s/+p modes for a reason, if you don't want your channel public, why on earth is it set that way? I can see why they use tor, I hate networks without hostmask hiding as well, I doubt it was because they were trying to hide the fact that they were bots. As for banning tor, theres tons of other legitimate reasons to ban it, including abuse, I doubt this was the only reason they banned tor, if it was even a contributing reason.
Then it doesn't seem to serve much purpose. This means the authoritarians can block it also. For the sake of accessibility, I hope they find a way around it. There are other ways of maintaining one's privacy.
What?
I use #wikipedia on Freenode almost every day. Posting logs from that channel to the internet is strictly prohibited, and if we find someone doing it, we ban them. Now I tend to cycle through lots of nicks there, most of which had 0 google hits when I started using them. Now they get dozens of hits (like this one) and that's because of these logging bots that post to the internet.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...that says the Bush administration is behind this somewhere. No stone unturned when it comes to spying on people. Follow the money and it'll lead to a no-bid DoD contract or a marriage of convenience with some gov agency.
Whether it's illegal or not is debatable. If you believe IRC is a commons, then there's no expectation of privacy in the first place. I put IRC, unencrypted email and web postings in the same category as billboards.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This basicaly sums up to Freenode/whatever-other-network trying to place DRM on IRC chat.
IRC is a public network, and technicaly there is no chance, ever to prevent someone from loging and publishing chat logs if he can be present in your chanel.
You want your chat to remane private? make a chanell invite only or require a password to join, problem solved.
If your chanell is public - it is PUBLIC, including searchable logs generated by whomever. so stop crying like a pre-teen scoolgirl.
A conversation is typically not copyrightable.
"The company says a channel is dropped when file sharing activity is detected and private conversations are not eavesdropped in anyway."
Well, that sounds like an easy fix... a few fake XDCC offer bots and they'll go away.
It is a live performance AND a written work. Easily something copyright covers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If it violates their privacy statement, you should sue their asses off.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The second type of communication is peer-to-peer. A user sends a message to a specific user. Examples include e-mail, phone communication, and the like.
Anyone can ensure the privacy of peer-to-peer communcation. Consider two users who want to exchange e-mail messages. First, the users pick a reliable encryption tool (which are readily available on the Internet) and an encryption key. Then, each user encrypts a message before sending it via e-mail to the other user. Even the NSA will be unable to crack the message (if the users pick a good encryption tool).
Encryption can also be applied to voice communication. The users can use an Internet-phone software application to communicate by voice via the Internet. Each user merely needs to encrypt the data packets before sending them to the other user's computer.
If you believe that someone (e.g., a Russian spy) is wiretapping your regular (mobile or landline) phone, then do voice communication via the Internet. In Russia, most people use cell phones, so they just need to ensure that the phone has a data-communication mode in addition to the regular voice-communication mode. To ensure private communication, the user switches the mode of his phone to data-communication mode and uses his phone as a modem. He plugs the modem into his computer and then runs an Internet-phone software application to communicate via the Internet. The FSB (successor to the KGB) can record the entire session of encrypted Internet packets, but the FSB will be unable to decipher the communication.
USENET used to be similar to IRC, in that it was used for casual, short-lived conversations, with expiration times for articles ranging from days to a few weeks. Post-1977, those articles should be automatically copyrighted and companies should not have a right to repurpose them from their originally intended usage. Well, that didn't stop companies like DejaNews from putting everything up on-line and making it searchable. Now, this company is doing the same thing for IRC.
I'm actually all for the principle that if you put it on the web or in a chat or on the public airwaves, people should be able to copy it, archive it, and redistribute it. However, such a principle needs to be formulated and enforced uniformly; it simply isn't right for some groups to get away with ignoring copyright and others to get charged with copyright infringement.
I'm not seeing what the problem is (then again, I didn't RTFA). The summary mentions that they're going into public channels. Does anyone expect privacy in a public chat channel? I keep logs of all my IRC conversations, and many channels have a bot especially in place to log everything. And a quick google search will often turn up logs for popular channels (#gentoo, #linux, #webdev, etc.)
why is it that people on slashdot still are beating this dead horse? you should have NO expectation of privacy in a public forum. that's what public means. get over yourselves. stop acting like your rights to privacy are being trampled when you make an ass out of yourselves in public.
It seems very silly (at best) to expect "privacy" on a public communications channel, especially when probably a lot of the participants keep their own logs anyway.
Let me tell you my favourite "in Soviet Russia" kind of story. The story of how a handful of Party officials held some hundreds of millions of people in line.
;)
Yes, everyone knows about Stalin's brutal mass executions and deportations. Very distasteful business, that. It also created so much resentment that it was unsustainable in the long run.
So it evolved into something more subtle: the idea that somewhere there's a dossier about you, containing a lot of the stupid things you've said in the past. You don't know exactly what or how much. (After all, they were the non-computer kind.) And you don't know when or how it will bite you in the arse later.
Maybe you can kiss any chance of traveling abroad goodbye. Maybe now your chances of promotion or of finding a better paid job, just became nil. Or maybe you're just this far from having to explain it all to the secret police and, if you're lucky, looking forward to a long career somewhere in Siberia. Or maybe it will bite your kid in the arse, if they can't get you. Etc.
In a nutshell, the idea was that you don't have an expectation of privacy. Anything you say, even nodding approvingly when comrade Piotr swears at the government at the pub, might become permanently attached to you and a factor in which way your future goes.
Worse yet, how do you know if comrade Piotr isn't an agent provocateur, trying to get you to say something you'll regret?
So people learned to think twice before opening their mouth, and avoid saying anything that might be used against them. It turned them into a mass of isolated (and thus vulnerable) individuals, because not many risked saying (or even listening to) anything that could have been the start of an organized resistance.
And now back to the topic, here's what I wonder: why the heck do we allow the same in the West, if it's done by corporate PHB's instead of the Communist Party?
The effects, way I see it, can be exactly the same: anything you ever say or do is recorded _somewhere_. Be it Google, or such recorder bots or whatever. And in an age where HR drone routinely google employees and prospective employees, it can come back to bite you in the arse.
And to get even more back on topic: even if you started a private conversation with comrade Piotr, how do you know if he's not just baiting you for something to post on Bash?
Yes, nicks are a privacy tool, but for most people it's not as unbreakable as they think. We already know that most ISPs would give away the owner of an IP address without even asking for a court order. Did you ever register that nick? Because if you did, now the IRC server has information linking that nick to an email address. If you think none can be bullied into giving it away, think twice.
Plus, are you paranoid enough to keep _all_ conversation at the level of "I'm evolvearth, you don't need to know my RL name and telephone number"? Well, kudos if you do, but most people don't. For most, online communication seems to be just an extension of RL communication. (And please don't imagine that said in a condemning tone or anything.)
So basically, all these attempts of recording everything we say or do... will they just turn us into some obedient serfs to our corporate overlords? You know, better not say anything that makes you sound like a maladjusted anarchist, because some HR drone will google you. That might be your job you're throwing away there. Better not say anything against the government too, because you don't know when your (current or future) company gets a chance at a government pork-barrel contract that requires a thorough background check. Etc.
Yes, you can password protect channels, do it all in private channels, etc, but I'd say even that might not help you much once enough people learned to just keep their mouth and fear strangers asking about certain matters.
Just some (admittedly pessimistic) stuff to think about, if you're bored enough
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Good luck defending something like that in court. I think you have a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the scope of copyright or the nature of conversations.
I love my sig.
but in most states a conversation is illegal to record unless all parties expressly allow it. The owner of a bar can't just start audio recording at all the tables if they want to...(video is OK with NO audio, and audio is allowed in "general" or at a register, but recording individuals is highly unethical and probably illegal, let alone to publish that somewhere. I don't see how IRC is any different other than it's "written" because it's typed on a computer so that may change the rules.. from an oral conversation.
<NotACow> TheWeasel: i'll add {{fact}} to "remarkable" assertions that are likely to be challenged
<TREYWiki> NotACow: I thought you ment someone vandalised the template
<NotACow> TheWeasel: even if i believe them to be true
<TheWeasel> NotACow: That's what it's for.
<NotACow> TREYWiki: no, the article [[Wikipedia:Citation needed]]
<NotACow> which is an essay, iirc
<TheWeasel> to many it's an instrument of war.
<NotACow> TheWeasel: as is every other policy and process on wikipedia.
<TheWeasel> Obstructing someone's word by making them cite even the most obvious of banalities.
<TheWeasel> *work
<NotACow> wikipedia is the battleground on which countless wars are fought on a daily basis
1. remove all previous logs
2. make the bots easily identifiable and on a OPT-IN basis only
3. make it easy for a channel owner to part a irseek bot from a channel should he/she change their mind
4. its heavily advertised on join of a channel that it is being logged
Additionally, Freenode wants a public apology to all their affected users. Or?
Short of suing the company for copyright infringement (which I think would be difficult to make stick in court), I don't really see what kind of leverage they have. Basically, their demands are "go out of business", because that's what complying with their demands would mean. So why should IrSeeK comply?
Once all information is publicly available, we won't need spy agencies anymore...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
...but in most states a conversation is illegal to record unless all parties expressly allow it.Not true. In most states a conversation can be recorded by any participant without the knowledge of others.
The owner of a bar can't just start audio recording at all the tables if they want to...True, but the owner of the bar is not a participant in (most of) those conversations.
If its the latter, you might be able to get it (the public access) taken down based on terms of use. If its the former, good luck. You are using the Internet. You are being logged. Live with it.
Have gnu, will travel.
There was a slashdot article about this long ago, but to recap: CIA and US government are logging ALL the IRC networks and feeding them to databases for terrorist relationship tracking, etc. They have been for years now. And commercial entities too. This data is for sale for anyone. The primary motivation is to track all major channels and identify people talking in them and make use of the information revealed. You get amazing results of people's health data, habits, insider information from work places. etc. Some companies go even so far as to do aggressive exploits to the computers and IRC/WEB clients (by posting web pages with trackers & exploits) in their attempts to determine who the individuals are. This is major business for government signals intelligence people.
I'm a bit confused about how this violates a users 'right to privacy'. They're on a public network that isn't closed in any way and in a channel where anyone can come in at any time and log conversations to a private log without their permission. Now, where is the expectation/right to privacy again?
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
no, we've had several articles about that here. Private recording of conversations is highly illegal in many places. There was a guy not too long back that recorded the police harassing him at his front door in his house and they charged him with EXACTLY this crime... and many other posters said their states had the same rules. Even business establishments are allowed to record, but there's rules about it.
They're public channels, why would anyone expect the conversations therein to be private? Heck, I run a loggerbot on the channels I op -- of course, the nick of that loggerbot is "GLoggerBot", so I guess it's not quite the same...
Went way over some peoples head.
Communicating through plain text on the internet no longer considered private.
More at eleven.
using System.Awesome;
FWIW, IRSeeK seems to have had a change of heart, or at least is being receptive to privacy concerns:
http://www.irseek.com/blog/
Sounds like a genuine response of concern to me...
And what has IRC been replaced by to a large extent? ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Chat. Individuals sending messages to one another in isolation via a corporate network which was doing who knows with all of that. On IRC we had DCC chat - direct chat without any middleman watching. Putting aside encryption (for both), it's the principle and design of the thing - we were allowed privacy, not beholden to some corporation. But more importantly, there was a social context, it was not only individuals messaging one another in isolation, although sometimes it was, but people hanging out in groups of like-minded people. It had a social element lacking in it that AIM does not have. Yes, I know AIM has some awful group-chat thing (which crashes on GAIM constantly) but it is a small tag-on to the isolating thing that AIM is.
Not that IRC is perfect. Sometimes a bunch of idiots would take over the channel. The architecture of control - channel operators, kicking and banning and the like - those are crude tools and something better could have been (or could still be) engineered. Especially in channels more free-wheeling than #gentoo or the like. But it is far better than the isolation of something like AIM.
Some positive things about IRC - Freenode is good. I like Indymedia's IRC network, if that type of thing is up your alley. I also like some uses it has been put to by programs - Wikipedia sends its recent changes to an IRC channel, and a number of different scripts use it to combat vandalism there. Some Gnutella clients used to use it to bootstrap - as do some other p2p programs like Freenet. All inspired uses of a protocol that is ideally suited for the type of social, collaborative efforts going on there.
It really depends on the channel. I'm sure #linux-help wouldn't mind having a bot called LogBot logging the channel and posting the results somewhere. This bot seems to be sneaking in, which indicates it is going where it is unwanted, and it seems it should be sought and destroyed.
This is just a sure fire way to cause more chans to go invite only (+i).
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
There is also TopicSpy which logs any urls (images, docs, videos, ...) found in IRC topics. While not invasive as as IRSeeK it can expose urls that were not intended to be public. Beware!
I foresee a simple but costly solution to this--channels that don't use pastebins and let people post segments of code are inevitably going to be not merely archived, but reproduced and published. In something like C, I doubt you could call that copyright infringement for five or six lines--but in a sufficiently expressive language like Perl, Python or APL, I'm pretty sure it would be fair game to register said algorithm and make a claim against the people who automatically copy and publish it without notification.
I mean--I hate to advocate flagrant abuse of copyright--but when their idea of "unobtrusive" basically means getting tor banned, lying about their client, and polymorphic usernames to wholly disguise the presence of a logger--pretty much anything you do to undermine them becomes fair game.
I for one used freenode (in particular) under the impression that I would be logged--but only by private, noncommercial parties who would likely only publish limited portions for clarification. This isn't about legal rights--freenode makes it clear that they don't restrict logging--it's pretty much inevitable with a decent client. But I at least would like to know when I'm being logged for commercial purposes. If they can't at least behave respectfully in this regard, I see no reason to grant them the courtesy of prior notice when they infringe a registered copyright--I'm not required to do that by law either. Decent people would give notice of course...
They've already published a clarification on their site http://www.irseek.com/blog/?p=3 . But What I want to know is--why lie about their client, and masking their origin through tor nodes? What non-malevolent purpose could that possibly have had? Their whole bit about being "unobtrusive" is a load of BS--an extra name in the channel that I can mask on, particularly with the name BOT in it works fine in every other channel.
Until they can justify their past subversive behavior--any future behavior loses the benefit of doubt with respect to intent. In any channels I run, they're now expressly banned in the topic line.
What is it about IRC that reduces supposedly grown men to the level of adolescent feuds? Or have I got the subject and object the wrong way around in that sentence?
As an IRC user I dislike IRSeek's business model and practices very much. Discussions on IRC channels are by definition available only to the people who join in, and making any log available without asking is bad etiquette and in most places it is against the terms of use. If we wanted to make our discussions public, we would speak in a Web forum or USENET newsgroup, or we would use our own logging facility and post the logs on our webpages.
People who believe IRC is dead or don't appreciate it are obviously not worthy of being called nerds. IRC is alive and well, and it is very interesting and useful. Remember that there are many IRC servers across the globe and many channels in them, just as there are many USENET newsgroups. If one network or channel is touched by the Eternal September, go to another server and at some point you *will* find interesting people.
By now bots with girls name like liona29, paula35, lola22 appearing on many IRC networks mainly from .fr tld. Any idea about this?
the only thing that changed was the number! I'm not sure if I should be flattered or mad!
1. You're chatting on a publicly accessible service and you bitch about privacy of your chats. Stupid. 2. Banning all TOR clients. Absolutely damn-fool stupid.
No, they did not charge him with exactly that crime; they charged him with recording the police because some jurisdictions have passed special laws giving police special protections against having their actions recorded. Your original statement was incorrect as you put it.
Want to use web forums for support? Now you have two problems: solving the original problem, and convincing someone to constantly watch the forum. Forums seem great from a user stand point: they're common enough that people know how to use them, they're searchable, and they're long lived (whereas, article withstanding, nobody reads IRC they werent present for). Users post a question on the forum, then wait for people to pounce. The problem is, forums are terrible from the standpoint of people who can answer your question: they're large in volume, have no particular features to support development or bugtracking, and generally require a developer to be constantly hitting refresh.
So probably some sort of specialized software can help. Mailing lists sound like a happy medium at first, but they require users to know how they work (for example, many lists allow messages from non subscribers, which works as long as you remind people to CC you) and for users to be happy with their mail client, and popular ones require someone to deal with spam. Bugzilla is terrible, its not easy to set up, and about as bad from usability as you can imagine. Plus people spam it too now.
Perhaps some sort of integrated hosting system can help. Launchpad has such a system, but it's not Free Software that you can download and run on your servers. Not every support question is a bug in the software, so it divides between "bugs" and "questions". Bugs have a workflow that results in a patch being applied a package and shipped. Questions generally stop at a solution. LP keeps separate states for each, such as "open", "answered", and "solved". SourceForge has a system as well, but nobody uses it because it's got everything out of the box (they should just kill the forums). Many intimidating forms just to ask a question. Google Code hosting has a support tracker, haven't seen it used much.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
1. Join one of these logged channels from an anonymous proxy.
2. Paste large paragraphs from works copyrighted by a litigious company.
3. Win
Essentially, yes. You've summarized my concerns better than my verbose roundabout style ever could. Thanks.
My only question was just how much such logging bots, "do no evil" Google, etc, just move us closer to... well, slavery. "Do no evil" Google has brought a lot of good, for example, but also brought us the reality where you _will_ be googled by your potential employer, and might suffer the consequences for some dumb thing you've said in freshman year.
Sometimes the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Sometimes the government is just one of the possible evils.
1. To start with the most important part: If you're a highly qualified expert -- I fancy myself one too -- you have that option. Most people don't. Most jobs involve interchangeable peons. Noone will lose any sleep over whether they hired someone uber-qualified to operate the cash register, or just the obedient peon who doesn't rock the boat. In fact, in most cases it can be argued that hiring the latter is the _better_ thing to do.
What I'm getting to is:
A) Most people don't have that option to be defiant. So if saying the wrong thing can spell even one extra month of unemployment, they'll rather say what a potential employer wants to hear.
B) A world where only the upper 1% experts can afford to speak their mind, is a world which has lost the battle. A small inteligentsia can be bought, arrested on trumped charges, discredited, whatever. Stalin did that too.
If everyone except you is too afraid to even listen to your crusade, you've already lost. You've just become the liability to a totalitarian regime -- either the totalitarian government kind, or the corporate-owned kind -- and they'll find a way to render you harmless.
2. In an ideal world, every employer would be logical like you describe.
In the real world, employers are swamped in resumes, and are just dying for a reason, any reason, no matter how arbitrary or lame, to discard some. Some will just mix them discard the bottom half of the pile. Some smart and successful people argued that you should discard anyone whose email address you don't like the sound of, or whose picture looks unprofessional, or whatever. At least one corporation is using numerology. Add the numbers for each letter in your name (where A=1, B=2, etc), add the digits of the result, repeat the last step until you have a single digit. If it matches the digit for the company's name, you're eligible, if not, noone will even read your resume. At all. Several corporations use tarot. Literally. Etc.
The only thing that matters is having a repeatable criterion, and one that doesn't fall afoul of discrimination laws. So even if you're not allowed to refuse employing someone because they're black, you can safely refuse to hire them because their name sums up to 3. Or because your HR department found something they dislike when googling them.
So even for the top experts, some will realize that they increase their chances of a better job, if they just keep their mouth shut. Even if it's a slight increase, hey, every bit helps. If keeping your big mouth shut gives you even a 1% chance of landing a better paying / more stable / better quality-of-life / etc job, there will be people who'll gladly take that advantage.
For the replaceable peons I've mentioned before? Doubly so. In fact, make it 10 times so.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'd love to be the little company that runs gay.com or manhunt.net because it would effectively allow me to map the national social network of alternative sexual behavior. Sort of like IRC ... 10 years ago.
Public statements made in public chatrooms are being made publicly available!? Oh noes!
Ok, so I've seen where people have quit doing IRC, as far back as '93 and are surprised anyone uses it anymore and others who say that IRC still has lots of vibrant communities.
So, for those people who do IRC, what types of communities are you involved in that are vibrant on IRC? I won't ask you to name channels or nodes unless you want a bunch of people to come looking, but at least what type of community is it?
Just curions...
And more on topic, people have had some pretty childish, disgusting, nasty, brutish... ahem, conversations in IRC one must imagine. So, how many would like those posted with real names instead of nicks? I imagine it would be at least quite embarrassing to a "few".
http://76.184.64.73/wikipedia.html.
How long will it take for you to figure it out and ban it?
Don't open your mouth with such foolishness agin, okay?
freenode generally blocks all tor connections to our normal servers. We have two systems for TOR access in place:
A normal hidden access node at mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion , which currently does not accept any new connections. Established connections are not affected.
A GPG-TOR system where every user has his or her own iline which can be accessed at 5t7o4shdbhotfuzp.onion . As you can generate throwaway keys, this keeps anonymity while allowing for accountability. This is the preferred access method and not affected by the TOR block.
You can find more information here or in #freenode on irc.freenode.net.
Richih
freenode staff
If someone went to a local Republican Youth meeting under a false name and wrote down what was said and posted it online, the majority of Slashdotters would congratulate them for their effort. Not long ago this happened in Denmark to wide acclaim.
In this case, the majority of Slashdotters condemn anonymous logging and posting of conversations.
I think it would be easy to guess my estimate of the human quality of the majority of Slashdotters.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I should bomb something ...and it's off the cuff remarks like that that are the reason I don't log chats
Just in case the FBI ever needs anything on me
I'm sure they can just get it from someone who DOES log chats.
*** FBI has joined #gamecubecafe
We saw it anyway.
*** FBI has quit IRC (Quit: )
What if I'm "pirating" Kiddie Linux?
This is similar in a way to Google getting hold of all Usenet archives since early 90s, and then putting it publicly online for everyone to see and search.
I recall that there were archives of Usenet, but not as readily accessible as via a web search.
I think IRC is different since it is transient in nature from the beginning. Yes, people can log channels, but they are few and they don't make it publicly accessible. It also causes an outcry if it happens in some channels.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You realize it was a joke right? No?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I wouldn't say "most" but some states do have laws that require all parties to expressly allow it. So that's an interesting point.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Tor exit nodes are easy to identify (that's why the servers are able to block them). Also, some networks (like EFNet) have been using ident as a general open-proxy check for years. There's no such thing as "authentication" of the IRC client. CTCP VERSION is not even remotely definitive.* And you have fingerprinting. Quick one off the top of my head: send PRIVMSG $nick
Finally, this kind of thing has been going on for years, and everyone knows about it (except Slashdot, evidently).
* FYI, IRC bots have been using scripts and "botpacks" that either don't reply at all (going against RFC, IIRC) or send out generic ircII/ircN/mIRC/BitchX/whatever replies since the beginning of time, in order to thwart would-be IRC op kills on stupid servers that don't like bots, or else as a form of security through obscurity to prevent script kids from immediately knowing which Eggdrop exploit will apply.
neat little plugin... try it sometime, let them log
:P
+OK jSA9\@$(J&GS*090mVA_8923A2338SJAsdN
they can have their bots follow me around all day
I don't understand how people can have an expectation of privacy. Even if you have no idea how the internet works, wouldn't you have a certain amount of built-in caution at this technology you don't get? For example, when typing to completely anonymous strangers and you are saying things you wouldn't want repeated, why wouldn't you take effort to safeguard *your* anonymity.
The people with these bots obviously took the time to do this surreptitiously, which is the issue at hand here. If they didn't feel what they were doing was wrong, they would not have been using clients that report as Mirc, human nicks, and Tor.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I think you've somewhat missed the point. Noone said that you _should_ keep your mouth shut. Kudos if you don't, in fact.
I'm just saying that most people do whatever works for them, in the short run, with the least effort. Most try to not end up martyrs for some ideological crusade. So I'll say that most _will_ learn to keep their mouth shut.
Since I've already mentioned the USSR, they had a bunch of dissidents, e.g., Andrei Sakharov. They refused to shut up or live in fear, but they didn't have any impact, actually. Simply because one guy or even 5 guys don't topple a regime. (Except in fairy tales and computer RPGs.) Once everyone else refuses to listen to you, you've already lost anyway.
And don't think it happens only in the USSR. E.g., you know that infamous AOL's giving away people's search strings? And how some search strings got linked to the actual people that used them? I'm betting already a bunch of people think twice about what they search for. That's one step on the road to conformism.
At any rate, I'm not saying you _should_ keep your mouth shut and live in fear. I'm saying quite the opposite, that we should see to it that noone else has to. Being a part of a tiny minority who'll speak their minds is brave, no doubt, but... ineffective.
Just because _you_ are not afraid, doesn't mean that you can ignore the problem. Because sooner or later you may get to live with the results anyway. Just because Sakharov, for example, wasn't afraid to speak against the Communist Party, didn't mean he was exempt from living in the USSR, nor from having to deal with their police.
Basically, yes, it's brave and commendable of you that you're willing to be the first against the wall. But maybe we should attack the problem early and at its source, so that there is no wall.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Just the name alone will scare people. IRSeeK: it has IRS in caps. IRS = Internal Revenue Service, i.e. the US tax agency (people outside the US might not know why that acronym inspires dread in many).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
IRCSeek's activities aren't anything new.
In the past we've had bots by google do similar, bots from ChatScan, and bots from IRCIrchiver, among others.
Current discussion on SearchIRC about this topic: http://searchirc.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=6264
The thing about this incarnation is that they're aware they're going to be banned, so they're using TOR to proxy their bots online with no means to identify them. Then the bots sit in channels logging without notifying anyone of their activities.
It appears to be intentionally underhanded.
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IRC and Usenet aren't like having a private conversation on a park bench in an otherwise-deserted area. It's like standing on a soapbox in a public forum (the real kind not the Internet kind) and shouting at anyone and everyone who chooses to wander up.
And in that case, I think you're quite right to assume that everything you're saying is being recorded, because you can't ensure the reverse. Unless you are in a place or situation where it's reasonable to assume that you can't be overheard by anyone else, you must assume that it is. If you don't know the people who are listening, how do you know that one of them isn't taking notes? You don't; and without taking steps to control who can walk up and listen, you're in no position to demand that people not take notes (or photographs, or whatever) in a public place.
What your tortured example is closer to would be using DCC between two users; that's a private conversation happening (arguably) within the context of (initially meeting in) a public space. There, the assumption of privacy isn't too stupid (we can get into whether all plaintext protocols are non-private, but that's for another day); it's like sitting on a park bench in an empty area and whispering. But that's not what's being logged; it's a red herring.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
With stuff like this going on who the hell cares what is or isn't done on IRC?
On usenet, you take a lot more time to write things in a well-articulated way that you would like the public to read. In IRC you just say whatever sillyness comes to mind and expect that only the people who are currently in the channel and active will read it.
Another poster made a similar analogy; my version:
Logging usenet is like making an archive of letters to the editor. Logging IRC is like taping what you say in the pub or a party.
Anyway, using an IRC channel is a privilege, not a right; if the owners say you can't log, you can't. I think legal action would be appropriate. Yes, they could take the logs into another country, but at least it would be more work.
Medium cat is MEDIUM.