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."

Comments

Re:Wow...

[radarsat1]

I agree that IRC is an odd medium to get support for a piece of software, but I've personally had the exact opposite experience. I've been getting to know git lately. Seeing as it's a bit of a strange beast, I've run into a few problems occasionally due to using the wrong command or whatever. Twice, I decided to try popping onto freenode (using Pidgin) and had my answer within about 10 seconds.

That said, I personally don't really _expect_ "good support" for FOSS, I usually assume that it's up to me to figure it out, and otherwise, that mailing lists are usually the best place to look. I'd say that about 95% of the time someone else has previously had the same problem and I can get my answer through Google in a few minutes.

Sure, there are times where I have to browse through pages and pages of hits, but often it's a really special corner case, and then I decide to make a post so that my question and answer might be archived somewhere for someone else to find. Don't forget to check newsgroups! Google Groups in particular contains tons of answers.

Re:IRC is still alive?

[Ash-Fox]

Does anyone really even bother with it now?

I use IRC daily and the amount of conversations and users have increased in my time of using IRC. And I've used IRC back when you had to dial into a BBS to use it, back when ANSI color codes were the norm (I was pretty young then, and couldn't type very coherent sentences).

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?

That really depends on IRC network and their channels. The places I goto haven't degenerated.

Re:If Tor is so easy to block

[lostfayth]

It's a feature.

8.4. You should hide the list of Tor relays, so people can't block the exits.

There are a few reasons we don't:

1. We can't help but make the information available, since Tor clients need to use it, so if the "blockers" want it, they can get it anyway.
2. If people want to block us, we believe that they should be allowed to do so. Obviously, we would prefer for everybody to allow Tor users to connect to them, but people have the right to decide who their services should allow connections from, and if they want to block anonymous users, they can.
3. Being blockable also has tactical advantages: it may be a persuasive response to website maintainers who feel threatened by Tor. Giving them the option may inspire them to stop and think about whether they really want to eliminate private access to their system, and if not, what other options they might have. The time they might otherwise have spent blocking Tor, they may instead spend rethinking their overall approach to privacy and anonymity.

http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#WhyBlockable

Re:Wow...

[AlXtreme]

Here's the greater point, why do people even go INTO channels if they're not going to chat? There were 50+ people in the channel I was in, and only one of them typed *anything* in 5 entire minutes.

Welcome, you must be new here!

Seriously, IRC is not IM. A lot of people are in multiple channels or are merely idling while they are actually doing useful stuff. You can't jump into an IRC channel and expect support on-the-spot. IRC doesn't work that way. Join, lurk a bit, if you notice some activity launch a question and don't expect an answer immediately.

I use IRC as a secondary support method (next to a mailinglist) for a project with a small following. The people who get IRC are relaxed and polite, even if they have to wait half an hour for an answer and I go out of my way to help them out. The people who don't get IRC frequently leave the channel just seconds before I help them out. C'est la vie.

Change of heart? (IRSeeK responds)

[pongo000]

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...

Re:IRC is still alive?

[Shakrai]

WTF? Do you even know what the point of IRC is?

Netsplits - my primary hate object. Since IRC is adfree and without a corporate backer, the service levels are often poor to terrible.

Anybody who has used IRC for awhile knows how to handle netsplits. They are a fact of life with the way the protocol works. And what do you mean "IRC is adfree without a corporate backer?" There is nothing called "IRC", there are individual IRC networks, most of which are volunteer efforts. Nothing is stopping you from finding or starting a network with corporate backing if you think it will be more reliable. Personally I think the fact that it's all volunteer run is a plus and not a negative.

No offline messages. Since there's no single backer, you can't send a message to someone that they'll get when they return.

Some networks have services that will do this. On others you can use a private bot to do it. You think it should be done at the protocol level instead?

No support for smileys/other short animations. No, it's not just teen girls using those

That's a client-level function. WTF are you bitching about? I'm sure there's a script out there for mIRC that would give you smilies and animations if you really want them. IRC is just a protocol for communication between servers and clients. It's up to the client to format and display the data. AIM is no different in this regard -- your wink is still sent as ';)' -- the client just puts a pretty graphic on it.

No support for mic, webcams etc

You could do webcams with sound with a decent script in most clients. But if that's what you want then IRC probably isn't for you.

DCC sucks terribly particularly with firewalls and NAT

Yeah and sending files on IM also sucks with firewalls and NAT, unless you have opened up ports or your client and router support upnp. Again, what's your point? How is this something lacking with IRC?

You can register for a nick on most networks, but that doesn't stop someone else from taking it so messages go to the wrong people

If those people are basing your identity solely off your nick then they don't understand IRC very well. And as you say, some networks have nick registration if this bothers you. Some will even auto-kill people using your nick.

Doing some of the more advanced features like sharing a folder with someone (fserve) is a lot harder than in modern chat programs

So write a better client if this bothers you that much. Or even a script for an existing client. There's very little you can't do with the scripting language in a modern client like ircII epic.

he hacks to allow other clients to access those networks aren't exactly helping the uptake of an open standards backend either

IRC is one the most open protocols there is. All of the various ircds are well documented and most are open-source (if not GNU) projects. The underlying IRC protocol itself is simple enough that anybody with Wireshark and half a brain could reverse engineer it if they wanted to do so. Hell, I largely taught myself scripting/coding and protocol analysis by playing around with IRC and tcpdump back in the day.