DALnet For Chatting, Not File Sharing 442
PFAK writes "DALnet IRC Network, formerly the world's largest IRC Network has announced that the IRC network has implemented a new "policy" that will phrohibit "Using a channel for the primary purpose of facilitating the transfer of files", as of March 1st, 2003. This will be another staggering blow for the formerly largest IRC network in the world, this comes after one of the many suprises on DALnet, such as the recent DDoS attacks against the network."
don't matter (Score:2, Informative)
Sharing files on Dalnet.. (Score:1, Informative)
Sure.. they get queued up for sends, but Dalnet's been so unreliable in the past that you never actually get any bytes transferred. You can pretty much guarantee that as soon as your back is turned you'll get disconnected.
Come to think of it, I never found warez on Dalnet in the first place... nitro, criten, newnet all seem better candidates for that kind of thing.
Re:well no kidding.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Freenet Anyway (Score:5, Informative)
The way it will be enforced is to manually shut down any groups whose sole purpose is deemed to be file transfering. You're right that it could be tough to squash all the hundreds of new groups that will innevitably be created to temporarily bypass a closure, but attracting a supply of users to the new channels could be even harder. Dalnet sharers will have to find some totally new way to go about business that is not reliant on lurking around preset channels, or they'll have to go elsewhere.
Re:EFNet? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:what does this have to do with rights online? (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like DALnet disagrees with you, although it does seem to be a limited right.
Re:Bad idea.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wa43Z sp33K!!! [OT] (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Somehow, I just don't get it... (Score:3, Informative)
Except that filesharing bots do not always remain on their own channels without bothering anyone else. You also get bots and "users" who like to "advertise" their services and channels.
Re:So why DALnet? (Score:5, Informative)
OFTC (Open and Free Technology Commmunity) [oftc.net] is all about opensource and code sharing. Essentially it was created when OPN started asking for money, and has a elected council to run the network. As far as i know, we have no warez channels.
Re:EFNet? (Score:3, Informative)
users channels
1. EFnet 115877 42693
2. QuakeNet 112496 134879
3. IRCnet 110942 54206
4. Undernet 99825 43173
you may notice that for example, quakenet is just full of cr**(more channels than users, meaning theres just shitloads of channels with one person)
Re:EFNet? (Score:1, Informative)
and the daily statistics at
http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/list1ua.var
You can see whos clearly the biggest.
Quakenet has alot of channels because, typically, all users join 6/7/8 or more channels. Thats including their small clan channels.
The other networks have less channels because the users only usually join one or two, and often those are big channels facilitating illegal activities.
At the moment i can be pretty damn sure that QuakeNet has very few trojaned hosts online, and no channels (bigger than ~3 users at least) trading files.
If people moan about QuakeNet having a lack of channels you can talk about things other than games in, why not make your own, QuakeNet has no rules to say channels must be gaming related.
The only thing non-gaming related channels can't do is request the channel service Q, but the smaller channel service, L, isnt restricted and is fine for most needs.
Re:Bad idea.. (Score:2, Informative)
It's all content, it's just not *file* content.
All major IRC networks will be doing this soon (Score:5, Informative)
Legal Action.
Surely, the RIAA knows about the abundance of MP3 and warez sites on IRC. They've gone after everyone else. It stands to reason that they'll come after IRC sooner or later. And like Napster, they have a central authority they can go to in order to take action.
This policy is a smart pre-emtptive move on DALnet's part.
Bot wars (Score:2, Informative)
In fact someone could simply mimick the chat going on in several channles at once and make it semi-sensible if they bothered to figure out a conversation following algorythm.. but purely random would work too for the most part for anything but close scrutiny..
Re:well no kidding.. (Score:2, Informative)
http://grc.com/dos/ grcdos.htm
Did you have friends on Dalnet? (Score:4, Informative)
Because of recent difficulties maintaining a connection to Dalnet, and because of the (understandable) wish for discretion on the part of Dalnet management, some of the assertions in this posting are unconfirmed and unsupported. This nonwithstanding, the following speculation is offered in the hope of illuminating to the best of my ability to percieve it, what's been really going on:
At about the middle of January this year, Dalnet servers were hit with a wave of massive DDoS attacks, quantified as greater than 1G per second per server with sweepingly damaging results.
There never were that many Dalnet login servers to begin with. The attack wave was successful in disabling all of them, and keeping them out of service entirely for over 7 days.
To complicate matters further, there have been credible reports on ircnews.com, irc-junkie.org and elsewhere of a certain degree of dissention within Dalnet, and the senior sysadmins and management of the companies providing server hosting. I mention this with reluctance, because the problem is bad enough anyway, but it is nevertheless true that the operational list of Dalnet servers available at this moment is quite different from the array online before the attack wave began, and that some of the defections are permanent, including some of the largest hubs.
Dalnet have commented officially on their website newsletter that the volume of DDoS garbage going into their hosts' servers was sufficient to not only knock Dalnet offline, but bad enough to interfere with the hosts' other (revenue earning) internet services.
At present also, login servers are resolving under slightly different names, making joining problematic for large numbers of users still, but as of last week at least, the expectation of a reasonably reliable login is plausible.
Dalnet is probably correct in having determined that their attackers method of acquiring zombies is by the use of worms, trojans.......use your favorite term - by sending files like XXXSallyXXX.GIF.vbs, or whatever, and that these OwN3d systems are the ones being enlisted to carry out DDoS waves.
They note with equal accuracy that a handful of filesharing channels are some of the most crowded on their network, and may be not carefully enough managed, and have hypothecated these as being most likely sources of widespread damage and infection, to several thousand users' systems, to Dalnet, other IRC networks and the internet overall.
The sociology of a filesharing channel is also a factor in this policy change. Where else in the world wide world would a user be so inclined to accept, click on and tinker with a file they acquired five minutes ago from an anonymous stranger with absolutely no verification? Windoze users are requested to NOT post lengthy replies babbling on and on about their firewalls. They're meaningless in this context. The file transferred and was run. Think about it.
All Dalnet have done, is announce they intend to shut down these channels. They had to do something.
Does this mean they're trying to ban filesharing via Dalnet alltogether? No. Even if the IRC protocol permitted this, which it doesn't, their response at server level is thought through and restrained in scope, and respected here accordingly.
Elsewhere on this thread it has been suggested that this decision is motivated by the desire to take away IRC users' freedom. I refute this with the comment that the freedom to unknowingly download a trojan to allow your billyware to be used in DDoS attacks is an unfortunate and unsuitable choice for a cause to defend in the name of liberty.
Re:well no kidding.. (Score:1, Informative)
Scroll down to:
Distributed Reflection
A Next-Generation DDoS Attack
and you can read all about this attack and how the perpetrator was owned.
Re:It is their network, but you happen to be an as (Score:2, Informative)
1) each person logged into the room takes up bandwidth on the irc server.
2) Each broadcast to the channel saying "I'm a fileswapper trade with me" requires bandwidth.
3) Now multiply this many times due to the fact that the "person" logged in is actually a bot thats designed to do all of this automatically and can keep doing this indefinitely for weeks.
A single person chatting does not take up as much bandwidth as a bot being a bot, but a bot that is on 24/7 saying the same thing over and over takes up more daily bandwidth than all but the most hardened IRC chatters.
Some irc servers actively drop people who "idle" on channels all day as well so that they don't waste bandwidth even though they don't want to be disconnected.