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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."
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.
IRC has always been about social groups. If you have one (or more), then its still good.
I think DALnet has done quite well handling abuse. We've switched our infrastructure over to an anycast model that seems to have made us fairly resilient to DOS attacks, and we have made major progress in dealing with drones and abusing bots.
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"How many times has someone come into a linux channel asking for help when the same question was answered 5 minutes earlier."
If that question is asked as frequently as you make it seem to be, the person asking it could have found the answer with a websearch. The fact that they didn't search the web tells you that they certainly won't use an irc search engine first either.
Strangely enough I made the same decision in about 93, so I'd say 15 years ago is when it went downhill (I remember +channels, before #channels!). I'm not sure if there's not a formula related to number of years out of college you are as to when 'IRC went downhill' :)
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
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.
Freenode is also a good place to get help with various problems, and you do get a sense of community in most channels.
/. since 2005 I would probably cringe if I reread it, but if you don't want it to be public don't say it in public.
Back on topic; I already knew about this, and don't see what the big deal is. I often run into chat logs while googling, sometimes they have useful info. Does anyone really consider a public IRC channel to be a private place?
A lot of the things I've said on
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I don't agree. IRC isn't some homogenous thing that can go downhill - there are thousands of networks and maybe millions of channels - so while a particular network may have gone 'downhill', others may well have improved.
I've been using irc since about 1991. Our channel doesn't suffer from spam, bots or abuse.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
What would make you more upset?
1) You walk into someone's office at work and find a list of the funniest quotes by you, that they had remembered from previous conversations.
2) You find out that they have been secretly tape recording every conversation you had with everyone at the office.
That's the fault of the protocol? I'm sure bittorrent is used for kiddy porn too -- but if I pointed that out in an argument against bittorrent I'd have 50 replies pointing out how it's also used for Linux ISOs, game updates, etc, etc.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
if you don't want it to be public don't say it in public.
This attitude is widespread, but very problematic, because it is a departure from long standing social norms and communication modes: A free society has a need for public communication which isn't set in stone. If your only options are to keep something private or have it recorded for all eternity that you said it (and when, where, to whom), many important things will not be spoken publicly. It's not so much a problem of privacy or no privacy: A public channel is not private. It's a matter of forgetting the mundane, so that people need not worry about having their every public move inspected and reevaluated later on. The grace of oblivion is not implemented in our information systems. This lack robs us of our chance to change or start anew, and that stifles public discourse. Again, it's not so much the expectation of privacy which is violated by these archives, it's the perceived transient nature of IRC (and Usenet before DejaNews.)