Questionable Data Mining Concerns IRC Community 306
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 still alive? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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But when Clinton did it, how many of the millions overlooked their own infidelities and called for his impeachment?
Point of order... Clinton was impeached nor for getting a blow-job by his intern (or even making her play the Human Humidor). He was impeached for lying under oath (a.k.a. committing Perjury). If you or I were to have done so to cover our asses as defendants in a civil lawsuit, we'd go straight to PIMTA prison for it. Remember, Clinton was a defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit, and sex in the office was relevant to the whole deal (now whether it was justified or not isn't the deal - fact is he was t
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Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I hardly use it that much, but when I do I don't use non-effnet servers but the smaller private networks that require authentification.
Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Min
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Some people say that all history is a shadow, so in a way aren't you saying that anything that existed in the past can be compared negatively to its "good old days?" I think in a different social circle this might be called "old-timer's disease." IRC is just as good as it's ever been in my 15 years of using it, but I don't use it for social purposes so my experience may be diffe
Ensuring the Privacy of Internet Communication (Score:3, Insightful)
The second type of communication is peer-to-peer. A user sends a message to a specific user. Examples include e-mail, phone communication, and the like.
Anyone can ensu
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The problem is, it's not quite like that. In your case, if so, I'd find it hard to believe that you had this user idling there for years without you ever once talking to it or figuring out that it was someon
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1. Netsplits - my primary hate object. Since IRC is adfree and without a corporate backer, the service levels are often poor to terrible.
2. No offline messages. Since there's no single backer, you can't send a message to someone that they'll get when they return.
3. Same goes for when you lose a conversation due to netsplits (you can DCC chat though, if you remember to use it).
4. No support for
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I think by "1970s" you mean 1988 [wikipedia.org], and by "commitee" you mean "a guy".
Anyway, didn't anyone learn from DejaNews? The response to this IRC transcript thing sounds exactly the same as when people on Usenet suddenly discovered that the stuff they wrote on their "ephemeral" public medium was being archived.
Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:5, Informative)
WTF? Do you even know what the point of IRC is?
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.
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?
That'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.
You 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.
Yeah 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?
If 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.
So 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.
IRC 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.
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Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been using irc since about 1991. Our channel doesn't suffer from spam, bots or abuse.
Long live IRC (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:IRC is still alive? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
What's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If your IRC text is copyrighted, then does quoting your comment in mine also count as a copyright violation?
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Re:What's the big deal? (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's obligatory. If you pay for them, you're part of the system of oppression, which makes you an enemy. If you're not with us, you're against us, and a part of the Axis of Evil, and no longer subject to the bounds of common morality and ethics. People who pay for media should be caned.
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Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of us out there started our technical exploration on IRC. Some people get into computers and then find IRC. Some are the opposite - find IRC and then get into computers. I can credit IRC and the people on there with my entire career choice.
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Five years from now you will regret that post, Mr. E. Pip Hani.
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Sorry. That battle is lost. It was lost at least when the scammers started archiving NNTP.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sorta (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Sorta (Score:5, Insightful)
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I refuse to live in fear about what people may think about what I've done or said. I'd rather live with consequences than live in fear. Even if that means I'm first against the wall...
Best summary ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Essentially, yes. You've summarized my concerns better than my verbose roundabout style ever could. Thanks.
My only question was just how much such logging bots, "do no evil" Google, etc, just move us closer to... well, slavery. "Do no evil" Google has brought a lot of good, for example, but also brought us the reality where you _will_ be googled by your potential employer, and might suffer the consequences for some dumb thing you've said in freshman year.
Sometimes the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Sometimes the government is just one of the possible evils.
1. To start with the most important part: If you're a highly qualified expert -- I fancy myself one too -- you have that option. Most people don't. Most jobs involve interchangeable peons. Noone will lose any sleep over whether they hired someone uber-qualified to operate the cash register, or just the obedient peon who doesn't rock the boat. In fact, in most cases it can be argued that hiring the latter is the _better_ thing to do.
What I'm getting to is:
A) Most people don't have that option to be defiant. So if saying the wrong thing can spell even one extra month of unemployment, they'll rather say what a potential employer wants to hear.
B) A world where only the upper 1% experts can afford to speak their mind, is a world which has lost the battle. A small inteligentsia can be bought, arrested on trumped charges, discredited, whatever. Stalin did that too.
If everyone except you is too afraid to even listen to your crusade, you've already lost. You've just become the liability to a totalitarian regime -- either the totalitarian government kind, or the corporate-owned kind -- and they'll find a way to render you harmless.
2. In an ideal world, every employer would be logical like you describe.
In the real world, employers are swamped in resumes, and are just dying for a reason, any reason, no matter how arbitrary or lame, to discard some. Some will just mix them discard the bottom half of the pile. Some smart and successful people argued that you should discard anyone whose email address you don't like the sound of, or whose picture looks unprofessional, or whatever. At least one corporation is using numerology. Add the numbers for each letter in your name (where A=1, B=2, etc), add the digits of the result, repeat the last step until you have a single digit. If it matches the digit for the company's name, you're eligible, if not, noone will even read your resume. At all. Several corporations use tarot. Literally. Etc.
The only thing that matters is having a repeatable criterion, and one that doesn't fall afoul of discrimination laws. So even if you're not allowed to refuse employing someone because they're black, you can safely refuse to hire them because their name sums up to 3. Or because your HR department found something they dislike when googling them.
So even for the top experts, some will realize that they increase their chances of a better job, if they just keep their mouth shut. Even if it's a slight increase, hey, every bit helps. If keeping your big mouth shut gives you even a 1% chance of landing a better paying / more stable / better quality-of-life / etc job, there will be people who'll gladly take that advantage.
For the replaceable peons I've mentioned before? Doubly so. In fact, make it 10 times so.
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And you don't think that the scale is a concern? It's one thing that people keep a log, but now, even that's not necessary, just have 'bots log in.
Freenode as OSS? (Score:3, Informative)
As a side note, DALnet has banned tor nodes quite a while ago, because of services abuse coming from those IP addresses.
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There is no privacy on the internet... (Score:2)
If you're posting something on the internet, you should have the expectation that everyone in the whole world may someday know it was you who wrote it.
David Brin's essay on the end of privacy is probably appropriate reading here...
But isn't anonymity a privacy right? (Score:2, Funny)
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Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
(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.)
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Informative)
That said, I personally don't really _expect_ "good support" for FOSS, I usually assume that it's up to me to figure it out, and otherwise, that mailing lists are usually the best place to look. I'd say that about 95% of the time someone else has previously had the same problem and I can get my answer through Google in a few minutes.
Sure, there are times where I have to browse through pages and pages of hits, but often it's a really special corner case, and then I decide to make a post so that my question and answer might be archived somewhere for someone else to find. Don't forget to check newsgroups! Google Groups in particular contains tons of answers.
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For what it's worth I much, much prefer web forums to mailing lists and to IRC. I don't want to subscribe to a
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
It was a very strange moment.
(Incidentally, no one had an answer then, either. I don't remember how I solved it then, or how I solved it in 2002, but I do remember eventually solving the problem).
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Nowadays, IRC is mostly a social forum and each well-established room as its own, sometimes peculiar, rules.
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If they're asleep, why don't they log out? Like a normal person?
Maybe because sometimes logging in a channel is just a way to signal your presence and that no one is chatting on this specific room anymore?
Then why does the room even exist? If they didn't log in and do nothing, there'd be no room, and then people like me wouldn't get confused as hell seeing a huge list of people NOT typing.
Nowadays, IRC is mostly a social forum and each well-established room as
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But as for IRC, when I'm on IRC I always leave the client going, even if I'm not active. People can still msg me and such and I can see it later when I get back, and I can scroll back and see what I've missed on current conversations, etc. For my own use I always tend to log conversations so I can always look back at stuff, though even that practice is frowned on by some.
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Because I am a user, not a master! I get help and I try to help. I don't know most of the things. But I occasionally look into the window if some question is asked that I know. I am there to tell what I know. When I don't know, I stay quite.
Or did you wanted someone to tell you as soon as you asked a question that "hey! I don't know. I feel sorry for your problem and it should not have happened, bla, bla?". See, it i
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Re:Wow... (Score:4, Informative)
Welcome, you must be new here!
Seriously, IRC is not IM. A lot of people are in multiple channels or are merely idling while they are actually doing useful stuff. You can't jump into an IRC channel and expect support on-the-spot. IRC doesn't work that way. Join, lurk a bit, if you notice some activity launch a question and don't expect an answer immediately.
I use IRC as a secondary support method (next to a mailinglist) for a project with a small following. The people who get IRC are relaxed and polite, even if they have to wait half an hour for an answer and I go out of my way to help them out. The people who don't get IRC frequently leave the channel just seconds before I help them out. C'est la vie.
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Well you obviously don't like IRC because you've only used it for support. For those of us who use it to just chat it's fine. And guess what? We usually leave our clients connected 24/7 even when we're not there. Would you have rather joined a support channel to find it empty? Maybe they could rename #support to #peoplewhocareaboutyourproblem.
Some IRC communities are hostile towards newcomers, giving a bad impression. But if you look around enough you'll find some that are ok.
One time I joined a c
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No, you need a sense of humor for things to be funny. Since you took my posting so literally, it's obvious that you don't have the pre-requisites in place.
I noticed this a while ago (Score:2)
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Easy solution. (Score:2)
Well, that sounds like an easy fix... a few fake XDCC offer bots and they'll go away.
Violates privacy statement? (Score:2)
just like DejaNews (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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why are people so lunkheaded? (Score:2, Interesting)
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"What happens online, stays online. Forever." (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimatum (Score:2)
Freenode's demands to IRSeeK are:
1. remove all previous logs
2. make the bots easily identifiable and on a OPT-IN basis only
3. make it easy for a channel owner to part a irseek bot from a channel should he/she change their mind
4. its heavily advertised on join of a channel that it is being logged
Additionally, Freenode wants a public apology to all their affected users.
Or?
Short of suing the company for copyright infringement (which I think would be difficult to make stick in court), I don't really see what kind of leverage they have. Basically, their demands are "go out of business", because that's what complying with their demands would mean. So why should IrSeeK comply?
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Some channels (particularly support types) will have use for a search bot.
It seems a bit underhanded how they disguised the bots as a human and used tor to hide the activity. Look at the web: the only search engines that try and disguise themselves and which ignore robots.txt belong to spammers. Legitimate search engines obey robots.txt and are easily identifiable by their
Information wants to be free... (Score:2)
What is the complaint? (Score:2)
If its the latter, you might be able to get it (the public access) taken down based on terms of use. If its the former, good luck. You are using the Internet. You are being logged. Live with it.
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
More at eleven.
Change of heart? (IRSeeK responds) (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.irseek.com/blog/ [irseek.com]
Sounds like a genuine response of concern to me...
Will degrade the IRC experiance. (Score:3, Insightful)
IRC is not automatically public (Score:3, Insightful)
As an IRC user I dislike IRSeek's business model and practices very much. Discussions on IRC channels are by definition available only to the people who join in, and making any log available without asking is bad etiquette and in most places it is against the terms of use. If we wanted to make our discussions public, we would speak in a Web forum or USENET newsgroup, or we would use our own logging facility and post the logs on our webpages.
People who believe IRC is dead or don't appreciate it are obviously not worthy of being called nerds. IRC is alive and well, and it is very interesting and useful. Remember that there are many IRC servers across the globe and many channels in them, just as there are many USENET newsgroups. If one network or channel is touched by the Eternal September, go to another server and at some point you *will* find interesting people.
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If that question is asked as frequently as you make it seem to be, the person asking it could have found the answer with a websearch. The fact that they didn't search the web tells you that they certainly won't use an irc search engine first either.
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Being in a channel dedicated to help where you are fully aware a clearly identified bot is logging all your traffic to a website is one thing...
Having a third party unconnected with the operators of the channel or the network it sits on covertly monitoring channels using intentionally hidden bots is quite different.
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Probably not. I strongly doubt they would put the logs on the web.
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Not true. In most states a conversation can be recorded by any participant without the knowledge of others.
True, but the owner of the bar is not a participant in (most of) those conversations.
Re:If Tor is so easy to block (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It's DejaNews all over again.
The first thing I thought of was DejaNews, too. There was a lot of knee-jerk resistance to the idea of a universal Usenet archive when it first got going (although there have always been smaller archives of particular groups, and there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it), but now I think it'd be tough to find someone who doesn't find it occasionally useful. (Google Groups, the web-to-news system separate from the archive, on the other hand...) Many newsreaders today are even built with integrated supp
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