IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

[Houshalter]

This is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this:

   <Swan/+report> test to see if infoserver is echoing 
   messages to group +war.  well all this info is probably old.
     The iraqis caused an oil spill 8-10 miles long and a 
   couple miles wide.  It's 12 times the size of that caused 
   by the exxon valdeez.  It's not known if wells are actively 
   pumping into the gulf right now, or if they just dumped 
   stored reserves.  If they're pumping at max capacity, it'll 
   get bigger by a factor every 3 days.  in other words it 
   will be 13 times the size of the exxon valdeez in 3 days, 
   14 in 6, 15 in 9.  (I realize I said that wrong).  That's a 
   worst case.  It's not possible to overstate how concerned 
   Bush seemed by this.  I think he aged a few years last 
   night.  the spill is not military significant, but 
   ecologically its a nightmare of course.  There is some 
   concern about water problems, the oil might threaten 
   desalination plants.  Yesterday the weather was much better 
   over iraq, so they set a record for the # of sorties in a 
   single day.  2700 I think.  they launched 2 missiles at 
   saudi arabia today, and 7 at israel.  (scuds).  One hit in 
   israel, lightly wounding a bunch of people, killing 1.  1 
   person died in saudi.  Patriots knocked out a whole bunch 
   of them.  I just heard from Cheneys mouth that Bush has 
   something planned to deal with the oil spill.  --mcneil 
   lehrer

[thaumaturgy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill

An air strike was conducted against the pipeline that was the most significant contributor of the spill, however there were some other sources as well. It ended up being several times larger than the Valdez spill, a lot of it ended up on the beaches of Saudi Arabia, and it was never cleaned up, so it's still causing a lot of ecological damage.

I don't think I'd heard about this until now.

[jdong]

This message seems to be way too long for IRC.

edit: I really don't get why people are downvoting this, the message appears to have at least 1298 characters.

[denom]

The success of the patriot missiles was a huge propaganda coup for the US. It turns out that the success rate of the missiles may have been as low as 10% or even zero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Success_rate_vs...

[Asparagirl]

File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits:

  <Ran> Is there anybody there? I am fine. 
  Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry

A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears".

IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...

[xelfer]

I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.

[dingaling]

Ironically much of the damage to Tel Aviv and Haifa was not the direct result of Scud impacts but debris and explosives from Patriot SAMs launched against them.

39 Scuds were fired, 17 were engaged by Patriots and three were confirmed intercepted. I can't find the figure of how many Patriots were actually launched.

The number of Patriots that struck the ground intact after failed launches / failed interceptions remains classified but is greater than four. Most of the rest self-destructed in flight.

[pling]

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade.

I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.

[sentenza]

That was truly a moment in the spotlight for Slashdot. It's just sad that it has mostly died due to continued neglect.

[mjhagen]

So many reports of other airplanes going missing on IRC that morning/day. Where were you on 9/11? “On IRC.”

[icpmacdo]

I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.

[sampo]

> We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio

There was similar activity on IRC right after the 2013 Boston bombings.

[Afforess]

Mirror zipped archive of all 39 IRC logs from the OP's link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/desert-storm.7z

[SoftwareMaven]

I remember very clearly sitting in my first math class in my first term of college, talking about the Gulf War when it started. I was 18 at the time. The big concern we had was another Vietnam, dragging on for years with a new draft. There was a lot of talk on campus about that, until it became clear the war was not going to last long.

[gonzo]

Russia invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. Carter re-instated draft registration the following June. I'd just turned 18, and thought Afghanistan or Iran (hostage crisis) would be my Vietnam.

[mikeash]

Thank goodness we remedied that mistake in 2003.

[rdl]

I wonder if the IRC logs from the Iraq War (round 2) will ever be declassified and released. IRC is used pretty extensively by the military for communications (generally just called "mIRC", since people associate it so strongly with the official military client), and there were a bunch of different channels on different networks to discuss operations in realtime.

http://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/

[maaku]

Military client? mIRC is shareware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC

[thefreeman]

FYI for some reason MalwareBytes treats that link as malicious.

[cmdrfred]

<CaptainJ> THE LIBERATION OF KUAIT HAS BEGUN <Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <Goofa> The liberation of Kuwait has begun. <Anipa> Mr Fritzwalter: the liberation of Kuwait has begun <Tylenol> WAR HAS STARTED!!!! <Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[keehun]

  <MistDrake> Announcement from the president of US: The
  liberation of Kuwait has begun

  <Arkie> i'm listening to nbc radio....

  <Starhawk> "Desert Storm"

[mineo]

The website doesn't seem to work reliably at the moment, here's the archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20131021002154/http://www.ibibli...

[pantalaimon]

Can we please make #hackernews on freenode a thing again?

[wmil]

Who would go there? It'd be hacker news without the news (articles).

[msutherl]

<Lipstick> I dont think bagdahd is on the net =]

<BOY> No arab countrys on the net..

[tottenhm]

Went to watch the July 4 fireworks in SF tonight, but it was cloudy, causing the fireworks to soften into a vague burst of color. I thought, "This looks just like CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. Except without all the fear and death. Damn, I'm lucky -- no war here!"

[nikanj]

The rest of the world would prefer the US to have its wars on its own soil though.

[sheetjs]

    #Belladona# Bagdad Radio reports Saddam has ordered his 
       troops out of Kuwait IMMEDIATELY!
    #Scott# unconfirmed, keep it to +war/+report
    #alex# belladona - stop making rumors ....

[Kiro]

What's the context?

[ganessh]

No access

[melloclello]

Archived SomethingAwful thread from 9/11/2001:

http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/

http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html

> WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR

[canjobear]

Page 13, Kramer says:

> Not to belittle the signifigance of these events, but you do realize that this means a whole slew of "anti terrorist" and probably "anti violence" laws will be passed through congress.

> Any "anti terrorist" laws will be given almost a blank check to do what is necessary. I'd be surprised if in 6 months you'll be able to make a domestic call without it being monitored.

> That's the way terrorism works. It's not the attack that hurts most people. A couple of hundred people die -- every death is tragic, but the truth is the real tragedy will be the loss of freedoms for the survivors.

[TeMPOraL]

From the thread:

> Now this is weird, since last week was the first showing of that X-files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" in Austalia. The plot of the first one was that some government group was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. Life imitates art?

Eee... WHAT? I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.

[madaxe_again]

Fascinating. I was in Dominica at the time. They threw a national street party for the day to celebrate "the big house falling down". I guess there's something of a grudge to be borne there, from hundreds of years of slavery.

Re: the thread, it's saddening quite how many were immediately desperate to go to war - with bin laden, nonetheless. This is generally a bit odd, given that OBL was only really known in the west for the Kenyan embassy bombings in 98 - and before that knocking off a German spook.

So, I guess my question is: Why we're folks so quick to choose OBL as the perp, even while every group on the planet was taking credit? Why this relatively unknown group who've done little in 3 years?

I suppose it's just odd that many seemed primed to have the same response, of "let's bomb Afghanistan".

[TeMPOraL]

Pro tip: increment the number in the second URL to see other pages of the discussion thread.

[ilaksh]

I'd like to see IRC logs from other countries at the same time.

As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil...

Hmm. I wonder what the IRC logs of the Venezuelan "liberation" will look like? Actually for Venezuelan's sake hopefully the economic warfare already going on, along with the encroachment coming from the direction of Brazil during World Cup, will be enough to "integrate" them into the system (i.e. "liberate" them of control over their resources) without requiring overt military action.

[TeMPOraL]

> As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions.

I like that idea. It could be really interesting and educating to play with an interactive map showing that. There are things like that appearing from time to time (like the article about Syria and Iraq from yesterday[0]); I hope that concept trend will catch on and we'll see more and more old and modern history knowledge expressed in interactive, explorable forms.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305

[pjc50]

Large areas of WW2 were oil-related: North Africa, Indonesia, southern USSR (leading to Stalingrad), etc. I've not yet seen someone write the oil-orientated history of that war.