I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff
p.haavard.me
p.haavard.me
15:04 <@Fuchs> as it is clearly stated in my letter, this was a draft
that was not supposed to be published, but a draft from
a colleague that linked to mine got indexed by a search
engine and found
15:04 <@Fuchs> as of right now, none of us resigned, freenode is still
ran by the same volunteers that ran it for the past 2
decades, and the rest is rumours and hearsay, we'll gladly
officially communicate when we can, until then I'd suggest
taking any rants, pastebins, articles and the likes with a
grain of saltNot only it injects newlines, it injects indentation. You can always 1) paste from logs 2) paste from the in-memory rawlog Irssi keeps or 3) use a script like xsel | tr '\t' ' ' | tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/ */ /g' | tee >(xsel -i) | xsel -ib to your clipboard (yes it uses tr uselessly)
Copy-pasteability is not really the goal of apps that use ncurses or similar interfaces. Side-by-side windows break it also.
Edit: Also compare to the staff listed in this deleted freenode blog linked by @gwd below.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode....
Edit 2: Who is OFTC and how do they fit in?
Edit: here’s the staff as of 23 Apr. tomaw is still there today, the rest are gone, including fuchs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231451/https://freenode....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27154226
maybe it wold be a positive event from the POV of the free sw community?
Edit 2: Er, I guess not:
https://gist.github.com/realrasengan/88549ec34ee32d01629354e...
This was later downplayed in 2019, after PIA was acquired by a company Kape with a poor track record: https://freenode.net/news/freenode-pia-changes
It appears shells.net which is another rasengan company (but not associated with Kape?) has since taken PIA's place in the organisation.
Writing letters that you don't send is an effective, practical, recommended way to manage anger and other emotions. It's even better than posting angry rants on the Internet. :)
IRC is a constant drama, all the way back to The Great Split[0]
Been involved with IRC a good 25 years, running a pretty popular blog about it "back in the days", i just couldn't be bothered keeping it up and updated because of all the constant fighting, arguing, bickering and people outright attacking each other all the damn time.
I'm not entirely sure what it is, but something about IRC gives people big egos, omnipotence fantasies which, again, leads to drama - i, myself, just concluded it wasn't worth my time anymore and moved on.
Mind you, this comes from someone who met his (former) wife on IRC, made great friendships with people all over the world - something i'm still grateful for to this very day.
But it wasn't made to last, sadly.
Reason for that is that Irc drama attracts brazillian hackers and script kiddies like flies, having an irc server is like having a huge DDoS magnet, having a irc server is an excellent way to make a whole ISP crumble under attack.
Last major irc network we had went bankrupt because of their DDoS protection costs rising and rising and rising until they went in debt to stay online and until they couldn't pay the debts.
For example many MMORPGs have Brazil-only servers, because brazillians tend to hack, cheat and troll, so many games have ip-banned the entire Brazil range and then made a server just for Brazillians.
When website defacing was all the rage, Brazil had the dubious hanking of having the most defacing groups and the most defaced sites, despite internet in Brazil being much smaller than US or EU.
According to Kapersky last year, Brazil is first place in cibercrime ranking in South America, and third in the worldwide ranking.
Brazil is also currently fourth place worldwide in the number of bot farms.
Ha, ha saw what you did there!
So, apparently for freenode staff it's either "Lee's way or the hiway"?
IRC in Brazil was mostly born on university campi but, by the second half of the 90's it quickly attracted teens who simply wanted to chat. Our version of the Eternal September.
Most used OS at the time was win9x and most used IRC client was mIRC. Actually, most users didn't know the difference between mIRC and IRC. So, it was very very unsafe for illiterate users. Self-reproducing mIRC scripts and people trying to fool others with netbus and the like was extremely common.
One day, by the end of the 90's, both major networks joined. The service quality went deeply down. Operators of big channels lost their status, illiterate users flooded the network and traditional brasnet channels got filled with users from redebreasil who weren't used to the established netiquette. To make things worse, redebrasil had advertisements and such ads went together with them when they joined brasnet.
That day was one of the saddest days of my life, that day I lost my operator status on #programacao on brasnet, I was 15 and getting that status was no easy task. It was the day I stopped using IRC in Brazil.
The thing just went downhill from there. Getting IRCop status was reason to act arrogantly, attacks were rampant and winxp came along been not much safer than win9x. Netsplit was common because of the attacks, bots tryied to fool people to shady and phishing sites, there was no control to stop abuse from IRCops...
Then, by the beginning of the 2000's IM became more popular, then social networks. Actually MSN messenger and orkut popularity were major blows in brazilian IRC. New people buying computers to get connected no longer even knew about the existence of what was once a major entertainment communication medium.
The quality of the service didn't improve, and users started migrating away from it. It commercially devalued, ISP's didn't want to host it and, in 2007, brasnet was closed: http://www.brasnet.org/2007/05/era-uma-vez-o-irc-brasileiro....
Citation needed. Most ISPs ban IRC ports due to having a large amount of customers that are members of a botnet via a virus.
Do something, or vote.
The political modus operandi of open source, to the extent that there is one, has generally been to opt out of existing structures and try to create new ones, rather than altering or dismantling existing ones.
Fixed that for you.
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/201...
I'd say it lasted.
But well, everything is political nowaday, and people apparently can't get political without creating drama. See: the last basecamp outrage.
Which apparently internet people have a hard time to handle.
I have parties at home with feminists and machists, cryto speculators and communists, vegan meditators and frat guys bbq body builders, atheist hedonists and muslim minimalists, yet they manage to have fun together.
When I read such title I can't help but thinking "what are they, 5 years old?".
Your parties sound like a blast!
They are, but they take a month to prepare for.
> Like the GP of this thread you might want to reread the actual post rather than skim the title. (see my other comment).
In retrospect, yeah.
I think you mean "polarized". And polarization is happening only in some societies, mostly in the anglosphere.
In many other places society was much more polarized 50 or 60 years ago.
But if I was to assume that you are talking about the US, both gender and racial discrimination around bathroom policies has been a hot discussion topic on-and-off for more than a hundred years.
I say that as an IRC user for at least 2 decades and a recent convert to Matrix.
Discord is probably the closest spiritual successor to irc (the types of communities using discord are the same types of communities that used irc in the past).
IRC is not a home. Discord is a home. FreeNode is (was?) a home. The admin and moderation team (and the corporate structure therein) makes a difference that technical details cannot replicate.
But with Discord users are locked in to use the closed source Discord clients, or reverse engineer the discord “protocol” and risk being banned because of it.
> You are not mistaken. We do not support 3rd party clients, and they are not allowed per our ToS/API ToS.
https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...
is not exactly the same level of supports third party clients that IRC or Matrix do.
> They want ... some ... service that gives them email.
Aren't these two statements contradictory?
"I have email" and "I have email service" mean the same thing to me.
Email is what makes it happen that systems can exchange messages with each other. Much like Matrix. Much unlike Discord.
The whole point of Matrix is decentralisation and federation - which is closer to the spirit of IRC than what Discord is.
Also, Matrix is a protocol, not a centralised service like Discord.
It isn't really. I can't confirm this despite being part of the biggest rooms in the network on matrix.org.
It was slow (very slow) once (when Matrix grow and Synapse wasn't scalable), but that has been in the past for a while now
Uh, some locked down corporate please-read-your-terms-of-service closed-source crapware?
That's pretty much the exact opposite.
I've had no problems with either my homeserver nor with Element -desktop or -android.
Discord is out, as others have mentioned, for being controlled by a single corporation.
Any community with sub-groups and a privilege system for ops/voice/... will generate drama.
It's not a fatality either, I've been on many smaller channels that were focusing on a specific topic and mostly used for technical discussions and the only moderator interventions were to kick spammers or update the /topic.
It saddens me a bit that IRC is so unpopular with newer generations, now the discussion has moved to proprietary, centralized solutions like Discord. Yet another nail in the free, distributed, decentralized, non-ad-driven, non-HTTP-based internet coffin.
The fact that anyone can start their own group limits tin god syndrome on those networks. IRC requires moderate technical skill and either running or paying for servers, which is enough of a hurdle that admins can get away with quite a lot of bad behaviour before being ousted.
Many internet users sure love complaining about "muh free speech" post-facto when they're more than happy to buy into closed ecosystems in the first place.
This is not aimed at you personally by the way, I'm just always frustrated to see this pattern repeating itself year after year and yet users keep hoping to new proprietary platforms. "No but we swear it's different this time you guys!!".
And back in its heydays there were enough big IRC networks that you could just hop from one to the other if the admins became a nuisance. Then you had an eggdrop bot synchronize both channels during the migration, good times.
Well yeah but with IRC you used to be able to perform hostile takeovers by knocking people offline strategically.
You can't really do that with Discord so the drama tends to stay as an argument rather than a DDoS battle
It seems the whole business, filled with young opinionated people, really invites these kind of dramas.
Surely this is selection bias, you don't hear about -no- drama.
I run an IRC network which hasn't had any real drama for 15 years... (Current global users: 322 Max: 1514)
<@Fuchs> as it is clearly stated in my letter, this was a draft that was not supposed to be published, but a draft from a colleague that linked to mine got indexed by a search engine and found
<@Fuchs> as of right now, none of us resigned, freenode is still ran by the same volunteers that ran it for the past 2 decades, and the rest is rumours and hearsay, we'll gladly officially communicate when we can, until then I'd suggest taking any rants, pastebins, articles and the likes with a grain of salt
Why would someone who wrote that email draft now say his own email was "rumours and hearsay"?
That just makes the whole thing sound even sketchier.
Also, geez, how can anyone who's an IT professional in 2021 think they can put something on the public internet without auth and keep it private? Really?
It seems like someone only jumped the gun on this information getting out, not that it wouldn’t come to be.
Not saying it is so, but...
Also at the time of writing it wasn't intended to be kept private, it's explicitly a message intended to be published at some point. It just never was and the situation changed, it's just an oversight.
2. The internet is much bigger than you think. The document is probably more likely to be found and publicized from your drawer at home than being found on a random server on the internet. People fight for visibility for a reason.
Only when several documents link to each other, the risk of being found goes up...
One link to your document will still get it indexed or no links but using chrome.
One person hearing about your document or finding it themselves is all it takes in the real world as well.
Not the same at all.
Maybe if the draw was outside and there was a camera showing inside of the draw and if anyone could travel at the speed of light. Still not the same at all.
To get access to a random's person house let alone drawer would be impossible and extremely costly and risky in most scenerios.
I mean, I know that this is a common thing these days, but it didn't use to be for a very long time. And it's still not what happens on my PC or phone.
But even then, the information leaks without the document itself. "I heard he is going to resign" is all it takes.
Google is really interested in indexing anything it doesn't know.
That said, it did mean a lot about my intent and feeling at the time.
And a few other things:
1) The front left tire on your car is about 6 psi too low
2) Not to worry you but we really think you should get your heart looked at: our listening devices heard something a bit irregular
3) the math homework you lost that time in 3rd grade was actually stolen by the kid sitting next to you who turned it in as his own. He got a gold star on it. But he's also now a janitor, so karma came through on that (usually it doesn't: the wicked go unpunished, speaking from our own experience on that)
Oh, and as a one-time freebie, next time you lose your keys just pickup any phone or speak into any smart home device, say your SS# and "keys please" and we'll let you know where they are.
10 volunteers all having their resignation letters pre-written and ready to go is a bit weirder and points to some real problems at the organization.
You don’t form a quitting pact to leave your home of 20 years at the same time with 10 coworkers and start a rival service unless you’re REALLY committed.
But to then walk it all back as rumours and hearsay after this much premeditation and thought was put into it? Nuh uh! There is some kind of coercion here in my opinion.
And while they clearly seem ready to do so, this does not mean it will happen. The problem could end up corrected, especially seeing what is on the line.
Don’t tell me nothing is going on and everything is alright.
Seriously, wtf?
Here is their 2017 blog about resignations:
According to https://p.haavard.me/ the pastebins expire after 24 hours. But most URLs in the pastebin already are 404, which likely means that someone pasted an old text file for an issue that happened some time ago.
I'm guessing stuff behind '/privat/' isn't supposed to be, er, public.. oops.
From government kickbacks from oil companies down to community sporting clubs there is a tragic phenomena where if you have corrupt individuals in charge at a single point in time then there is a chance for an irreversible loss of a public good.
Here's a link about a community club in Australia where one of the directors ended up owning the clubs assets after some bad decision [0].
[0] - https://www.michaelwest.com.au/a-barilaro-affair-how-the-bar...
In the UK we had a referendum for more direct democracy. Something like 65% voted against, with a low turnout. Brilliant
[1] https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode....
https://twitter.com/liberachat
Their twitter was created last month.
Seems like there was an attempt at damage control more than anything else.
IRC was good, and I still use it, but even I as a 51 years old greybeard unix/linux accolyte realise that IRC has had its day.
If any of these chaps are reading this, move to Matrix - it'll be more resilient than IRC.
Also there are new modern irc servers around (such as Oragono) that integrate lots of things that are often missed/bolted on externally, like history, bouncer, authentication, etc.
The difference is that IRC doesn't try to address these issues and just lets them happen, whereas Matrix does try and sometimes gets it wrong (more due to implementation bugs than protocol issues).
I don't think it's fair to conclude that IRC is "more reliable" on that basis - if anything, I would say that Matrix comes out on top here despite the existing implementation issues. At least it eventually gets things into the right state.
Also remembering IRC's netsplits resulting in IRC Services being split off and resultant and inevitable chaos when the netsplits end.
And like I said.. you can get that all in a neatly integrated package where you don't have to worry about any of that anymore.
And frankly I don't really care about it magically back filling the log later on, since the moment has passed. I value "Availability" above all else. And here IRC is unparalleled.
And improving upon the netsplits without breaking this aspect is really quite difficult.
Same happening as IRC - but with a different and more resilient protocol.
I also think including Slack along with Matrix is incorrect, as Slack is - like Discord - a centrally controlled walled garden. Matrix is not like those two at all.
The Matrix architecture is much closer to the one used by Jabber Multi User Chat (with perhaps a fancier MUC protocol) than IRC.
In any case that wasn't my point earlier. That was that I never had the issue on IRC that my homeserver somehow got stuck for several minutes while it did "something" in the room resolution protocol before suddenly catching up all of a sudden. And that I'll take netsplits any day over it being stuck.
I've never experienced what you're describing with the homeserver getting stuck while it did something, though I have had Element Android time out and seemingly not notice for a while & keep spinning, but that was the client's fault, not the server. My best guess is that whatever you experienced did get fixed!
Not sure what the issue was in the end, but I have had it with all clients I had tried (mobile, desktop, ..).
Sorry you had that issue!
In Matrix it could be a problem, but practically it's not a problem even in the largest room #matrix:matrix.org with probably thousands of servers. But it makes joining that room quite slow and resource intensive.
Of course there is no IRC network with thousands of servers, because accepted hosts are well curated by the rules of the IRC network whereas any Matrix server can join the global federation. Granted, you don't need to join a chat network with an IRC server, but then neither does a Matrix server.
I am not talking about talking to my friends (since that's already solved with a private irc network), but for random people on rather large public rooms, where everyone will be isolated to their homeserver without manual configuration (granted.. since we have some big homeservers like matrix.org probably they'll able to continue chatting in the room).
Edit: Turns out I misremembered the federation algorithm from the spec - seems like it is indeed currently full-mesh and not a directed graph so I retract my remark.
I've found the matrix-synapse homeserver I run to be stable. Along with Element-desktop and the Element android app it's been a great experience for me.
With both of those, you don't need to worry about history or bouncers, as history gets synched even if you power down your homeserver and back up again like I do.
And authentication comes as a by-product of matrix-synapse/Element.
I also love url and picture previews displayed directly in Element (and other clients) by way of synapse - far nicer experience than the text-only of IRC in my opinion.
I think IRC has had its day. At least with myself.
IRC's concept of requiring an active TCP connection for your session is archaic but dead simple, and the only times you have to wonder whether or not someone received your message is if they got a ping timeout shortly after, and the user list might get out of sync once in a honeymoon when there's a net-split. Nothing about IRC changes anymore, so you won't get surprised by regressions and bug fixes every month. I can see how people miss long multi-line messages and animated gifs in IRC, but I just don't. It's straight forward text communications, no bullshit.
Is that unlucky moment during Element sending/trying to send the message to the server?
In this case Element stores messages now until they are sent (since 1.7.26).
Otherwise, don't see how this could happen.
What is the difference with IRC clients showing URL/picture in terms of experience?
IRC is still alive and well thanks.
That’s not shady to you, especially for a company that sells privacy?
/s
The threat I'm protecting against isn't the state reading my emails, it's Spotify (for example, but there are many, many more) refusing to sign me up because my IP is in a different country to my bank account.
Or every single bloody website on the internet ignoring my browser's preferred language settings and serving me content in the language that they think my IP address comes from.
Disclaimer: I’ve been doing just that for 13 years now
If you're American and want a VPN based in America (not the Virgin Islands etc), I've found TorGuard[2] to be very good as well.
This is a problem for a lot of web services. Apparently where your IP is located determines where you bank and what language you speak. Apparently people like me don't exist, or rather, are a small enough market to be completely ignored (which was the upshot of my conversation with Spotify support when I asked them to send me invoices in a language I understood, please, since they know I use the English client but send me bills in German).
So to make my life easier, I use a VPN and pretend I'm in Australia/UK/Jersey/USA/Estonia/wherever makes most sense.
I'm happy to pay for that. So far PIA have been great. They even have a good-looking Linux client that works with Wireguard.
But if there's shadiness, then I'd like to be aware of it. I was genuinely asking where the shadiness is here.
Not OMG SHADY! but definitely gives me cause for concern. As one comment said: "Trust and ethics are important."
The vast majority of VPN selling points are nothing but FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Security-wise, most (all?) websites you care about now use HTTPS which provides end-to-end encryption and are thus immune to malicious networks (public Wi-Fi isn't risky at all despite what some VPN ads say), and even if not, then the VPN isn't bulletproof either as it merely shifts the unencrypted traffic from your "local network -> server" to "VPN provider -> server" which might actually attrack more scrutiny from malicious actors as they've now got to only tap a single point and get lots of unencrypted traffic. Privacy-wise the biggest threats to your privacy are advertising companies and social networks, which will track you just as well if you're on a VPN based on cookies or browser fingerprinting (a VPN alone wouldn't protect you - I guess if you clear your cookies before switching to the VPN and never allow cookies to cross-over between VPN/non-VPN you might have a chance, but surprisingly this is never mentioned in any of their ads).
I’d even say they’re probably making direct profit from the $2.69 a month plan too. Essentially all VPN providers do is resell bandwidth, just at an insane upcharge in the name of “privacy”.
You got away with it because those 10 people are trustworthy and didn't use the VPN for malicious activities (or they managed to fly under the radar).
Now try actually advertise that VPN like the big VPN providers do and see how you fare. You'll get your droplet and entire DigitalOcean account shut down in no time, and the administrative overhead of having to deal with all the abuse reports and support queries will make it unsustainable.
---
> The insane 3 year or 2 year deals are obviously subsidized by continuous sign ups, meaning constant in your face ad placement is necessary.
So essentially it's a pyramid scheme then.
I'm sure there are backhaul providers that will turn a blind eye to constant abuse reports. And since we agree that these companies are shady I can't imagine they have too big of a team that handles these. They probably forward them to users and call it a day. Too many in a short period of time? Close the account.
> So essentially it's a pyramid scheme then.
Of course this is speculation, but it makes logical sense to me. Imagine how many people will sign up for the 2/3 year, use it a lot for the first few months and then just drop off? PIA gets a large payment upfront, on an already high margin business, allowing them to spend insane money on advertisements or YouTube placements, netting them more customers who sign up for the year bundles. Rinse and repeat.
Best of luck.
> Sadly, some time ago, a holding company, Freenode Limited, was sold or transferred in some way to a third party by our previous head of staff
Apparently the third party is called Private Internet Access (PIA), according to other posts. Who's the previous head of staff, and how did they have the authority to sell Freenode Ltd.? How long ago did it happen? Was this ever announced or discussed among other staff, and are the exact details of the deal even known by anyone else?
Someone else also asked this, but, what are the "recent changes"? To what end is the third party company exerting control?
It feels to me like someone was at some point put in charge of Freenode, and then decided they could make a buck off of it. If that's the case then the "hostile takeover" already happened long ago the moment that person decided to sell it. But there are so many unanswered questions here that I can't be sure of anything. It's a totally vague and confusing letter, and it alludes to all sorts of troubling things without ever clearly stating exactly what they are.
Maybe in a little while all the drafts get published and we'll actually learn exactly what's going on. But then maybe there's something I'm missing, so if anyone knows please let me know.
You might want to consider to shut down the clearnet port, since users will send their account passwords and all their communication inkl private messages in plaintext over the internet. I don't think that this is a good idea.
(edit: At least, they certainly haven't resigned as of yet.)
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
But what I like about this feed is that I am constantly being exposed to new things.
IRC is "internet relay chat", it's a very simple protocol, you can even telnet into an IRC server. Though there are lots of IRC clients that make it much nicer to handle multiple channels and direct messages and so on.
IRC was super popular from the 90s up until Slack showed up.
What changes exactly? And whats the point in this message ?
You cannot add favorite channels to discord, it's hard to browse, electron is clunky, and discord is centralizing all that data.
And if you just want an irc server for a couple friends you can just ignore ChanServ/NickServ.. it's not really needed (hell.. ircnet is still going strong and has no services at all!)
I keep saying that this is something discord pushes subconsciously and it makes a lot more places unliveable.
On IRC chans feel more open and sociable than discord. On discord most servers come up with a lot more rules, a lot more steps (get a role) and people were often very tense. I had very sad and angry bouts on irc but it was rarer and about a topic disagreement / douche behaviour and not about bowing to a small group view on how to talk or laugh. It really gave a sect feeling. Then there are the slughtly5 political discord servers where you get a background check before the right to see rooms. Really odd (unless you're deep into anthropology)
What do people think volunteering is? Play time?
1) Penetration testers relentlessly scanned my IP address every time I connected.
2) Endless PMs pleaded for help recovering accounts with "forgotten" passwords on various servers.
I never fell victim, but got tired of feeling like a target.
You probably mean the very boring automated open proxy scan that every IRC network runs.
wish the entire staff godspeed with the new network.
Not really a huge surprise after the network was sold to a VPN company