IRC Logger with fluid web interface, search function, and live streaming (2019) | Hacker News Reader

IRC Logger with fluid web interface, search function, and live streaming (2019)

github.com

90 pointsluu31 comments

I think it would be better to merge the days together into one long page essentially.. possibly 'jump' to specific days if needed. And a way to hide all the joins/parts/nickchanges

Joins and parts are hidden by default, there's a checkbox to show them. Nick changes are shown by default so you know if someone changes identity, which is sometimes important context.

Personally, I am glad the days are different pages, it makes it easy to tell if there's any new messages since last I looked at a glance because I don't have to look at date stamps. The only real downside is sometimes I've missed the occasional 23:55 time stamp message because I thought I saw everything in the previous day.

Sorry I just kinda found this funny since it's basically becomes an IRC client that you can't chat in.

Do not hesitate to support its developer.[0,1]

[0] https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1250519176055328775

[1] https://www.patreon.com/whitequark

An IRC log viewer was one of my first real projects back in early 2000s. It consisted of a Python script to parse the log files and load them into a mySQL database and a PHP frontend to view. I learnt more than I ever wanted to know about character encoding.

This is great, I've wanted to write one myself for a while - but does anyone know if I can plug in my years of ZNC logs? Or does it require the specific log format its own logger produces (which basically means it can never be backwards-looking)

As long as the logs are kept private.

Making them public without the permission of all the participants has both ethical and legal implications.

It would certainly be courteous to inform users that logging for display on a public website is happening. That said, when I'm in an IRC channel I expect everyone is logging actively and I have no control over where those logs will end up. I guess I view it as speaking in public.

It'd be cool if irclogger would skip logging channels with +s/+p. Obviously it's up to the service runner which channels are added to the config, but it would let individual channels decide to opt-out (or even opt-out for a certain amount of time by setting/unsetting it.)

In the case of Whitelogger, the Freenode username they use is _whitelogger. The name makes it pretty obvious what it's doing and it's sitting at the top of the user list on any channel it's logging.

Ideally, it's also handy to put your log link in the channel MOTD to everyone knows where the IRC log is.

> I guess I view it as speaking in public.

100% this. IRC chat has no right to privacy as far as I'm concerned. If anyone can join without an explicit invite that has an expectation of privacy, those rights don't exist.

I would see it more like a conversation in a public place / at a convention. Sure, anyone can join the conversation and listen in. I would still be unpleasantly surprised if someone posted a recording on a website.

Most IRC clients are logging the conversation by default, and everyone knows it. Even if they werent; you're speaking in public.

But there's a difference between recording and publishing. We know that everyone is recording, but publishing the logs isn't as common and can be surprising.

It's speaking in public. Common or surprising isn't legally relevent. And since it's the internet; it can't be. It's one reason why sovergn groups of humans are so fantastic.

Not legally relevant doesn't mean not relevant.

And freenode does have a clear policy on public logging, requiring you to disclose that you are logging beforehand or get permission before publishing. [0]

[0] https://freenode.net/policies#public-logging

Lots of things that are legal (or legally irrelevant) are not socially acceptable.

That's IRC, it's public (nearly) by definition.

Where?

I ended up on Amazon adding "A machine made this book" to my shopping list.

I love IRC logs, I find them extremely helpful for diagnosing and working through technical issues that someone has faced before.

It's like a step-by-step guide to solving your problem.

Unfortunately, all of the IRC logs I used to browse went offline with GDPR. GDPR, California's privacy act, etc. are all well-meaning but IMO poorly implemented.

Most of the "GDPR violations" are not actually GDPR violations. People get stressed out and worried when actually there is no legal problem. I think for the case of the GDPR it would count as publically available information (or the analogous legal construct).

The worry is that you don't want a court answering this for you, and that you don't control what people enter.

For GDPR the consent of all participants is missing. In a recent HN discussion some people were explicitly complaining about their chats getting published.

GDPR has a chilling effect[0] on the web. If a lawyer comes claiming a GDPR violation, how many independent web developers have the money and time to fight it in court?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

"If a lawyer comes claiming ..." This doesn't happen in Europe. GDPR will not be used for individual claims from lawyers. Especially independant developers have nothing to worry about if they act in good faith. The enforcers of GDPR in each country don't have enough resources to act on everything which means only the biggest companies have to worry about claims. Also, it's not the responsibility of the web developer to make a website/platform comply to a law. The client who pays you to make the website is responsible and can hire a jurist to tell the developer what the requirements of the product are.

Atleast in germany it has already been established that a legal person cannot sue other legal persons over the GDPR. This implies that legal persons can also not sue a natural person over it.

The main authority is the GDPR agency of the country, they will push the court cases, if they become necessary. So far, my communication with my local one has been very pleasant and they're generally happy to help me either understand or discuss if something is a violation and how I would go about fixing it. They don't want to sue you or slap a fine on you the first thing in the morning if it's possible to simply work with you.

In the Netherlands, I’d happily take that bet. In the US, not so much.

That is an incredibly broad interpretation of the chilling effect since in Europe you haven't had the legal right to misuse peoples private information that they've provided to you (a business) since the early 80s at least. To run foul of the GDPR you actually have to be infringing upon other peoples legally protected rights, and maybe you consider not being allowed to post private or personal conversations in full to be 'chilling' but then the opposite is equally as true, publicly doxing people has an incredible chilling effect on public discourse yet it's something constitutionally protected under America's rather special free speech amendment.

As far as legal fees goes, how is this any different than any other frivolous letter from a lawyer? Do you find that it's common in your experience for independent web developers to close up shop as soon as they get a cease and desist? I really don't mean to sound patronising but the concern here comes across as an incredibly American view point, much of the world uses the English rule when it comes to legal fees where the losing party pays the legal fees (within reason) for the winning party[0], getting taken to court is still no walk in the park and it doesn't completely stop frivolous lawsuits but the difference in lawsuit culture should speak for itself.

But all of that is a moot point, the GDPR is a civil law with civil penalties and it's not something you're taken to court over, as the other commentator mentions I'm not even sure if lawyers can deal with GDPR complaints privately, instead what happens is each EU27(+UK) member state has an independent public authority[1] who is responsible for dealing with GDPR complaints when the complainant can't resolve the issue with you directly. Some countries like the UK only sparingly give large fines to larger companies while others like Spain and the German speaking countries hand out fines for breaking the law like candy[2].

So how does the GDPR restrict running an IRC logging service (in the EU+UK)? At the very least users need to be informed in a clear and simple manner of what you are doing, this could be done through sending a notice or a message to a user when they join a channel. You may need to provide an opt-out mechanism which would be a lot better for compliance and almost completely covers your arse but it's likely not necessary, informed consent can likely be assumed when they don't leave the channel after being notified that it's publicly logged, and if the issue of consent is truly a concern and you don't want to selectively allow users to opt-out of logging to preserve context in logs what you can do instead is have the channel opt-in where the user never receives voice until explicitly consenting to the log bot. Tech support (i.e., programming, distro) channels likely have a better argument for assuming consent as the nature of these channels isn't for personal discussions, it's common for these channels to have logging bot as well. For the most part what users publicly send to a channel is not considered PII, this is especially true for tech support orientated questions. You may need to provide a mechanism to modify/(pseudo)anonymise/remove personal information, it'd be smart to modify the logger to tokenise user and host names to make replacing text easier and this also allows you to anonymises the data incredibly easily.

IRC being what it is works in your favour here, the only PII you should ever have on users are their usernames(+ 'name' field, maybe 'real name' field too, host mask) and potentially their IP if the IRC server hasn't already anonymised it for you, some PII can still leak into logs like if a user accidentally pastes their email address publicly and it'd be prudent to deal with requests asking you to remove it, but for the most part the extra burden placed upon you would only be to deal with those requests, and as already discussed most logs aren't considered PII so you shouldn't need to remove much. It would be unlikely that somebody even complains to the relevant supervisory authority but if that were the case they'd first try to establish that you've handled requests to remove data appropriately, and then that you have the grounds to be doing what you're doing, etc. But if that's too much of a burden and you're not a European citizen then you have nothing to worry about, ignore the requests and follow your own countries laws, as stated it's constitutionally protected in America.

I know you were making a general point about the effect the GDPR has on the internet but I really do disagree with the parallels to the chilling effect, to have your freedom of expression censored you have to actively ignore other peoples rights to privacy, and as far as IRC logging bots go it's likely one of the easiest services to make complaint.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...

[1] https://kirkpatrickprice.com/blog/whos-enforcing-gdpr/

[2] https://www.enforcementtracker.com/

I wish more IRC interactions weren't "Question = RTFM"

I can only handle so many questions that are answered within the first 2 pages of the documentation before I lose patience. RTFM evolved as a defence response. But actually, in my experience RTFM-type responses were pretty rare in the channels I frequented and people usually give the benefit of doubt. I usually try to answer and then include a link to where they could have found the information themselves. Sometimes a seemingly lazy question spawns something more interesting.

I haven't used IRC for about a year now but that's not related to user behaviour.

IRC loggers, the solution to a self-created problem

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