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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."
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 ----
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. If I didn't know better, I'd just assume that IRC was a buggy POS that didn't work. (Look it says 50+ people are here but I can't see what any of them are typing!)
Comment of the year
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.
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.
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.