Hacker News Reader

Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

First a pandemic and now my online home of the last 20 years being torn apart. This is really upsetting. The people of freenode are something special. I really hope the community can manage the switch without loosing too much of everything. Already the channel registration on libera is throwing established communities into chaos.

I really hate that corporate shell game bullshit and attempts at monetization are being made by a dude that professes to love IRC. I wish andrew could acknowledge the hurt he is causing but it seems like saving face matters more to him at this point.

View on HN

If you’ve been on for 20 years, you’ll remember they last time this happened. It’ll sort itself out.

I remember EFnet and Undernet.

IRC will live on.

Eris has actually remerged with EFnet... They need to change the name...

One day april fool's joke:

> On April 1, 2018, as an April Fools' joke, the 1990s IRC server eris.Berkeley.EDU server was resurrected. Some EFnet admins worked with the Open Computing Facility student group at UC Berkeley for months to resurrect the server for April Fools. Only a very few EFnet staff were aware of the efforts and the server was linked in via a defunct H:line for the (normally) leaf (client-only) server irc.efnet.nl, bypassing the normal linking procedure. As of 12:30 UTC on April 01 2018, eris.Berkeley.EDU was once again a valid IRC server on the "Eris Free" IRC network and accepted clients.[11] At the same time, efnet.org begin redirecting to erisnet.org.[12] eris.Berkeley.EDU delinked on April 02 2018 at 19:50 UTC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

Knowing only the name Eris Free Net, and none of the history, this doesn't mean anything to me. I have no idea if this is a network that's free of Eris, or a free network named after Eris. While I have a vague memory of a server named Eris having existed in the past, I don't know if said server is the same Eris in the name, or a different Eris that may have a direct (ownership)/indirect (named in honor of)/no link with the server. Eris is the Greek goddess of discord and strife, not something you'd want in your community.

If he has caused that much of a problem, then just move on. Block him, stop mentioning him by name, and forget about it. For the open source community, he no longer exists.

I mean I feel like changing the domain name is less of a problem than the one all of the 4000 people named Andrew Lee who are not that guy now have. It's a lot harder to change a legal name. So they will have to live with his bad reputation potentially rubbing off on them. But luckily online most people use aliases so that should mitigate it somewhat.

Libera.chat is a more modern name anyway.

Hosting an irc Network is more work than you might think. Just a new domain name and a VPS with a service running on it might not be enough.

Supposedly[0] all the servers and other network infrastructure are intact, and it's solely the domain names (freenode.{org,net,com}) that were compromised. Grain of salt, obviously, but they have at least claimed there isn't a problem there.

0: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...

So what happened to the original service running on freenode.net? Is it down now?

Nothing. It's still up.

(Again, supposedly) it's now running at libera.chat with superficial cosmetic changes. I haven't investigated this in any real depth though, so don't quote me on that.

Freenode is still up, at freenode.net, and libera is a new network, at libera.chat, operated by the former staff of Freenode.

>The server hardware is sponsored free of cost; we will occasionally receive an invoice for $0, but that's only because of how the accounting systems at some of our sponsors operate. I can't possibly imagine that the few freenode live conferences cost more than 50k; and all of the other miscellaneous expenses (like the renewal costs for the domain names) are well under a few hundred pounds per year. Anything he would have donated before Freenode Ltd's acquisition is unknown to me, but that would have been from the position of a benefactor, not a supposed owner.

https://gist.github.com/aaronmdjones/1a9a93ded5b7d162c3f58bd...

Libera.chat is actually an awful name, but I still embrace the change and have already bid Freenode a permanent farewell.

That is a subjective opinion, not objective fact. I think it rolls nicely.

It is both harder to spell and pronounce than freenode, and objectively worse, by those measures.

Is it hard to pronounce by whom? English speakers? I promise you any speaker of a latin-derived language will have no problems whatsoever.

“Freenode” has only 1 possible pronunciation (and corresponding spelling) in English. “Libera” has 3 or 4 conceivable pronunciations and is harder to guarantee correctness when spoken.

Fortunately I doubt IRC servers need to be communicated vocally all that often.

It's really tough to find an unencumbered name these days. Even made-up names like 'eelo' (Android distro) got in trouble because a tiny human resources company in the Netherlands was using the name 'eelloo'. Not even the same name, totally different business type but still they lost. Trademarks are applied ridiculously wide now and because of that all the good names are gone.

I never understood what was wrong with the original "open projects network".

That's still the best name.

More to the point, .chat is one of those latecomer TLDs that is thoroughly abused by spammers. If they send email and they want it delivered, they're going to have a great time with that, unless they have a .net or something they can use.

>If they send email and they want it delivered, they're going to have a great time with that,

Your sass is unnecessary. Their nickserv registration email was delivered to gmail just fine.

Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An unsettling number of people now seem to be under the impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all email is Gmail and Gmail is all email.

Even if Gmail is currently delivering the messages (for now...), other service providers have to manage spam in their own way, and TLDs are sometimes a really strong signal for message reputation. For example, 99% of email traffic from .info addresses is spam, and the other 1% is mostly spam too.

I don't confuse email with gmail, thank you very much. I gave gmail as an example specifically because a) that's what I used, and b) gmail like all other big providers is anal about accepting email and quick on the trigger-finger about marking it as spam even when it does.

> Email and Gmail are not perfectly congruent. An unsettling number of people now seem to be under the impression that Gmail "is" email, in the sense that all email is Gmail and Gmail is all email.

Even major services. I tried to create an Esty account the other day, and it rejected all addresses from my Fastmail-managed personal domains, and would only take a gmail address.

Luckly it turns out you don't need an account to order, and I was able to use my custom domain for an unregistered checkout.

> I tried to create an Esty account the other day, and it rejected all addresses from my Fastmail-managed personal domains, and would only take a gmail address.

This must be related to the tld you're using, right? Not that Etsy only allows @gmail.com addresses?

I've noticed that some sites will specifically ban public domains from throwaway services like mailinator, but I can't recall having encountered a blanket tld ban.

> This must be related to the tld you're using, right? Not that Etsy only allows @gmail.com addresses?

I wasn't using a weird TLD. It was a .us that only my family uses.

I didn't try too hard to get it to work, or figure out exactly what their criteria were, but I kept getting blocked until I used my old gmail. Their customer support wasn't very helpful, either.

Interesting. Out of curiosity, I just tried to register with one of my personal .us domains (g suite) and one of my work .com domains (fastmail) and both worked fine. Maybe they changed their validation after you submitted your case!

I thought I ran into the same issue with another site a few weeks ago, turns out I was just misspelling my domain name and their validation was checking that they could actually get an email to that domain.

Nickserv registration went to my spam folder on Protonmail, as a datapoint.

We have advanced a lot since the age of spamassassin. They will be fine.

My nickserv registration worked fine btw.

My nickserv email was indeed marked as spam. Outlook.com backend.

But most of the good stuff gets marked these days despite spf/dkim so I'm not particularly shocked.

I have considered removing SPF rules on my personal domain, as every time someone spoofs my donation to attack corporate emails, their antivirus will incorrectly bounce them all back, at which point they end up in my inbox due to my catch-all; they will then send me a dozen emails complaining about it. The only servers allowed by my SPF is Gmail and one of my personal servers (I usually I use ssmtp, but that doesn't help with software that directly speaks SMTP)

Well "libera" means free in Italian so it makes sense to me. There are also other projects with sound the same such as libre (spanish I guess) office. I like it. But I'm biased being from Italy.

It really is an awful name. I'm not even sure how to pronounce it and its very forgettable.

it will settle. Just keep trying, we'll get back together.

Freenode has been dead for years lol. No where near the same level of activity it used to have.

A small community can still have a lot of value to it's members.

> seems like saving face matters more

This is sadly always the case. For everything. We'd rather let people die (e.g. Challenger) than admit any fault or delay to fix a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com