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?

[RLiegh]

I was on IRC ten years ago too, and IMO it's stronger today than it was then -simply by virtue of the fact that it's more popular. Ten years ago it was very rare to see irc channels mentioned on people's pages; but now half the time you're reading some web comic or whatever you'll see a 'join us on # on ' message. The big names have petered out, but irc itself seems to be more pervasive than it was in 97 from a cultural point of view.

Oh, and I think that as far as networks go -rizon.net and quakenet (just to cite to examples off the top of my head) have done very well for themselves. I'm sure if I paid attention to IRC I could rattle off more networks.

IRC isn't dying any more than BSD is dying -less so, probably.