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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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The three people who still use IRC are going to be *pissed!*
(Last time I used IRC was in an attempt to get support on a particular open source software package. Worst. Support. Ever. In a room with 50+ connected people, seemingly every single one was AFK for a solid 5 minutes. Of course when someone got back, they just told me I was in the wrong IRC room to ask that question, [you know, the one in the product's documentation!] and I was stupid for not knowing it. The other 49 AFK people never said a word, so I kind of wondered why the hell they even bothered to connect. Of course, maybe they were all secret IRC logging bots, heh.)
Comment of the year
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
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Communicating through plain text on the internet no longer considered private.
More at eleven.
using System.Awesome;
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...
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.
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 thoseThat'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 etcYou 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 NATYeah 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 peopleIf 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 programsSo 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 eitherIRC 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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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.)