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: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.