There were 20-something handles they used over approximately a 6 month period of monitoring. I was always able to find a small piece of information to correlate these handles together. Sometimes it started with a hunch, such as the language (even slang) they would use, but eventually they'd slip up in some way and we'd have a pretty irrefutable link to the person.
This information helped us develop a motive behind the hack and the ongoing public info was then fed to national crime agencies. My employer never went through with prosecution, but as this person was of much interest behind other hacks they were eventually prosecuted and convicted. I always wondered if my occasional Echelog intelligence reports ever had a role in that conviction.
You won't see their replies obviously (split thread) but if you delete the message, it gets deleted from your followers, but won't continue on to the server that your server blocks. So a copy will continue to exist.
I just treat the fediverse as a big chatroom/reddit thread that can never be deleted.
Treat the whole internet that way. You can't forcefully delete things from other peoples computers/minds. The best you can do is request.
I deal with this by posting almost nothing under my real name and switching usernames regularly.
I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active on IRC. Are loggers a more recent (as in this millenium) development?
Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack, etc. allows you to see messages while you were offline. Compared to things from the older eras of messaging like AIM and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone unless they were online as well.
So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a relatively more modern element: They're filling in a gap IRC has with modern chat clients.
IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!
IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others.
You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24].
[2] https://oftc.net
[10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
[11] https://weechat.org/
[12] https://kiwiirc.com
[13] https://codeux.com/textual
[15] https://mirc.com/
[16] https://adiirc.com/
[17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot
[18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot
[19] https://kiwiirc.com/
[20] https://znc.in
[24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc
Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!
We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment. https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/
On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?
IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly impossible to me, so I shut down some time ago. (It might have violated earlier privacy regulations as well, hard to tell).
Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it goes to court, none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own lawyer seemed too expensive, and nobody who asked me to continue running it offered to pay for a lawyer either. Tough luck.
All percentages estimations only, of course :-)
> Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running the site, no longer makes sense for me.
Supybot's successor is Limnoria: https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria
GitHub plugin: https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-plugins/tree/master/GitHu...
Btw. on the topic of bouncers, Simon Ser is developing a new one in Go: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju
IRC is lacking so many critical features that people consider the fundamentals of IM now. IRCv3 has been in development for forever and they still aren't done and even if they finished it it would never make it to all the irc servers and clients.
At this point it makes sense to join most other open source projects in moving to Matrix which still has active development and the ability to actually push out new spec changes in the current decade.
I drop into IRC whenever I need help with an Arduino project or want to catchup with old colleagues. From my own personal experience, all the open source communities I get involved with use IRC and I have never known one use Matrix, sometimes this is for personal reasons and sometimes for work. This probably depends on what techie circles you move in.
I've also noticed IRC is more popular in certain countries. Anecdotally Brazil and Sweden seem to have fairly large communities of nontechnical people on IRC.
Maybe for some people, IRC does what they want and they don't need any updated spec.
mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days
[2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html
[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
I don't want to be a part of this.
Yes IRC has an impressive list of servers, clients and networks built up over the last 3-4 decades.
Outside the major hubs (freenode) and FOSS channels though, actual usage seems to be going down.
IRC is no longer the “default” for chat, like it used to be.
And I say that as someone heavily invested in IRC, operating an IRC-network for almost 2 decades.
that said, none of the newer alternatives are any better unfortunately.
it seems jabber really was the only federated system with any moderate success, and maybe matrix is getting there too with its ability to integrate different services.
On AmigaOS, amirc (which many clients cloned the UI of) and wookiechat.
Even kolibriOS ships an irc client.
It's a nice, simple protocol that's human readable and imposes very little overhead on the clients.
With Bitlbee and sacc(1) I can access even HN via Gopher and comment it on Telegram via sic(1). Magical and my setup could work even under a 286 with Minix2.
You can connect with SSL and optionally SASL (as well as cloaking your IP) but this is encrypted to the server. Most of IRC is public anyway though so E2E doesn't make total sense.
This is #2 on HN because people are reading "Freenode IRC ... is shutting down." That'd be closer to the gmail end of your spectrum. We are not shutting down freenode.
Second, I don't think this is necessarily a big deal, though I could imagine that channel users liked the convenience of having their channel logged for them. There may even have been an ersatz Slack use-case there that people could easily get used to.
However, channel logging has historically been the responsibility of channel users themselves, so there's a loss of convenience that could easily be taken up by a channel user setting up their own facility: a tiny AWS instance running a bot logging to S3, with a web interface and maybe a search engine. But that takes time and money and maintenance and interest.
However, all of this functionality is out there on the web and internet, and has been used for a long time in various incarnations. I'm sure there are EFNet logs out there that go back well into the 90s.
s/channels/code So is COBOL.
IRC has a ton of advantages:
1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school.
2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting.
3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison
4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language.
https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/
5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself.
e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language
6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time.
7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server.
8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.
For me, the thing that Discord does really well is having a persistent message history, so I can join a server about a topic, see the pinned posts, read an FAQ channel, and learn a bunch without having to ask a question. That may be improved with IRC now, but at least when I was last using it (wow, 2 decades ago?!) that was a real pain point.
1) Go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ 2) Type something into the "Nick" box. 3) Solve the CAPTCHA 4) Hit Start.
Freenode has thousands of channels, there's a bot called "alis" that can help you find something interesting. To do that:
5) type "/msg alis list python -min 50", which will open a chat with alis, which will then show the channels with "python" in the name that have at least 50 users. 6) type "/join #python" to join the channel
Some channels require you to register before you can chat, for that, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration
If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow, or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have an answer in under five minutes and an interactive explanation.
IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam, advertisement, and noise.
If the material was important to someone, they would already be connected with a bouncer or logger of some kind. For people who can't run bouncers, etc, this is a good service, but again - if you really thought it was vital to your work and/or personal life, you would have spent some money to either purchase an irc service (like irccloud, etc) or pay someone to run a proper logging service.
The historical aspects are not nearly as dire in my opinion, - all someone has to do is to get a copy of the archive from this person (who doesn't seem opposed to this idea) - and host it somewhere. Again, the problem is costs - if someone deamed it important enough, they will mirror it.
In this age, probably someone like the Internet Archive since no one will pay for the maintenance (legally, technically, and otherwise).
The logs - depend on your stance. For what I do, no logs is better. Fewer logs may drive more people back. But here are many other loggers.
FYI, IRC is still very handy to have and deploy in 2020. It is light enough for a small VPS to handle, easy to scale by federating if needed, and the lack of file support and of logs can be a feature to keep everything private for in house deployments.
Just this morning I started to evaluate replacing some Javascript and Go code by some Fortran.
I'm starting to believe in the army motto: "Yesterday technology, tomorrow!"
And it wouldn't kill IRC. Projects would just relocate to other irc networks, such as oftc. Some new networks might emerge.
There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.
I didn't realize how important at the time it was being founded. Rob Levin was an online acquaintance, and one day he started asking about how to fund an open source community service with donations. I was interested in open source and non-profits, so he and I talked a bit about that, but I didn't volunteer to help. Next thing I knew, he'd started Freenode, and projects flocked to it.
IRC as a system, though, is massively important. I'd say it's like the Twitter of the first half (so far) of the internet. When the (first) Gulf War began, the first reports were via IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835
Think of the father in “there will be blood”.
There aren't many uncovered edge cases I can see.
You bring up an interesting point about GPDR and aggregate logging. The same probably applies to mailing list archives.
but that's not the issue. the issue is that i can't maintain a global identity, and that i have to add each network into any configuration instead of just sending a message to anyone on any network without creating an identity on that network (even if it's just picking a nickname).
some of this could be worked around in the client if the client has an uptodate list of irc networks so that sending a message to embee@freenode would automatically connect your client to freenode, make you pick a nickname and send the message.
hmm, that's an interresting thought experiment.
how could this be made seamless without inviting spam.
Discord is a lot easier to use, but in a lot of ways it is really limited compared to the IRC clients.
You must remember a different IRC to me. Spam bots were a semi frequent thing.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
While I don't know if the IRC Server software supports it, there's no reason you couldn't encode some kind of unique tag into the stream of IRC messages sent to each client. Unless you were running two clients and diffing their logs you wouldn't notice.
It could be as simple as seeing additional events, or modified whois/client information on join/leave, or even completely fake client join/leaves.
If you control the IRC server, there's nothing stopping you from modifying the events sent to every client in a way that lets you identify that client.
Been meaning to check out Convos which looks like it solves much the same problems.
I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day.
There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-related webdev Discord servers that that each have at least 100 unique users interacting daily.
I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just echoes in the system, autoreconnecting from old hardware long after their owners have moved on.
In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing great!" But frankly I don't think people realize how much IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has been eaten and it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging people who once used it in its prime.
Social media, especially things like Twitter and the various short video sharing services took away the "general chat" demographic -- partially because folks who were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel closer, and folks who are not tend to be younger, and the younger demographic trends towards newer technologies.
Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as you point out this isn't always the case. I would argue that freenode is probably safe from too much decline for a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit harsh :)) also tend to be people with a lot of experience in $technical_topic. If you want to ask questions about $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on IRC, that's where you go.
You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is not on IRC. Javascript is a relatively new technology (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer, and Elm newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability to run native applications written in JS has caused that community to surge. It's also relatively easier to get into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So you attract more people, and you're going to attract younger people, and you're going to have a really diverse audience for a wide range of topics. All of a sudden a single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem like fun, so you decide to use Discord or Slack. I think this makes a lot of sense for lots of communities.
For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical communities, IRC is still a good solution. It's not fair to say that "its lunch has been eaten" -- it'll remain relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most accessible way to communicate. But there are other, different solutions for similar problems that do a better job of catering to specific audiences. And that's just fine.
Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts from server stats, which are mostly aggregates. So I can't answer that question. But Freenode's a rather active network.
[0] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2014/tops-of-...
> Sorry to say but
Please just drop that prefix.
> On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?