A long time ago parsing Echelog logs was how I was able to monitor the IRC activity of an attacker at a company I used to work at. I didn't normally sit on these channels myself, but Echelog enabled me to look back and collect data on the various handles that this person operated under.
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.
I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.
I run a mastodon server on the fediverse (distributed social networking over activitypub). Mastodon and Pleroma support deletes, but say you post something and someone boosts it and one of their followers sees it on a server your server blocks.
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.
Yes, I agree. Lots(most?) of channels on freenode are explicitly not publicly logged anywhere, and the freenode staff are pretty helpful at helping chanops enforce this. None of the channels I help run have any public logs available.
I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10].
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].
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!
IRC is still alive in the fact that people still use it, but its dying (less people use it over time) in a way that will never be overcome.
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.
If only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone out there is willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you coffee so I can switch over from irssi
mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days
What happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
this list exemplifies the biggest issue i have with IRC. it's not federated. these are all islands, and i'd have to sign up on each one of them to join the community there.
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.
So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is?
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.
I've used IRC for over 20 years and have never heard of this service. On your scale, it's "your second cousin's friend's sister's dog's goldfish had a VPS that went down."
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.
First of all, you're not too young for IRC, it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! Depending on your interests your usage could resemble a live-action Reddit.
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.
IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.
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.
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.
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
unofficial irc logging services are kinda like the "I don't want to pay anyone, but I want to freeload off someone's netflix account" of the irc age.
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).
freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing.
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!"
This is just one logging service, not any actual IRC servers. So today's news is not necessarily a huge deal.
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
I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the perl/raku communities, but also other channels).
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.
Good riddance. I like irc more when I don't have to measure every word I say because some douchebag is silently logging everything and putting it in a website for everybody to see, index and archive, without my permission or anybody else's.
Sad to see GDPR still slowly killing anything too small to pay a legal team (basically anything that can be sued that hasn't incorporated, ie, human persons).
> Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running the site, no longer makes sense for me.
I am surprised that privacy aware companies are not using IRC more for their intra company chat, and that none invested in a webcam voice chat client for IRC. Even the most basic server can handle thousands of clients.
[+] [-] jtakkala|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unixhero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdsully|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jfindley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasengan|5 years ago|reply
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].
[1] https://freenode.net
[2] https://oftc.net
[3] https://rizon.net
[4] https://www.dal.net
[5] https://tildeverse.org
[6] https://snoonet.org/
[7] https://quakenet.org/
[8] https://efnet.org
[9] https://ircnet.com
[10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
[11] https://weechat.org/
[12] https://kiwiirc.com
[13] https://codeux.com/textual
[14] https://palaverapp.com/
[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
[21] https://irccloud.com/
[22] https://quassel-irc.org/
[23] https://www.bitlbee.org/
[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!
[+] [-] buovjaga|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Polylactic_acid|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] airstrike|5 years ago|reply
mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days
[+] [-] kick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toxik|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efdee|5 years ago|reply
I don't want to be a part of this.
[+] [-] josteink|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] em-bee|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] snvzz|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Avamander|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedays|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tr33house|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] admax88q|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andarleen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|5 years ago|reply
We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment. https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/
[+] [-] myu701|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dhodell|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rhizome|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] uk_programmer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cbm-vic-20|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] ori_b|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Operyl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barkingcat|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] 1996|5 years ago|reply
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!"
[+] [-] ryanong|5 years ago|reply
There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.
[+] [-] ken|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] idclip|5 years ago|reply
Think of the father in “there will be blood”.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eloahx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlgeek|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kirstenbirgit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infogulch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgraves|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snvzz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
> Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running the site, no longer makes sense for me.
[+] [-] andarleen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ragest69|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]