Is it true that they pulled freenode’s mail server?
I see lots of emotion here, and emotion is fine. But yanking someone’s existing infrastructure isn’t very nice.
If that part isn’t true, though, then someone here is lying.
I see lots of emotion here, and emotion is fine. But yanking someone’s existing infrastructure isn’t very nice.
If that part isn’t true, though, then someone here is lying.
What happened after then will have entirely been within the control of the freenode management, their administration, and their sponsors.
Every ex-freenode staffer I have talked to has been exceptionally cautious about damaging the data and systems they tended for literal decades, and to my knowledge none were disrupted.
I think here, you have to look to Andrew, ask what his transition plan was, and what he thought would happen when he started throwing lawyer's letters at the head of a functioning and healthy team of sysadmins and staff members who were happy to continue the job they'd been doing for years, for the community, indefinitely..
Andrew claims they brought a lawyer in after their access to the DNS was revoked and their request for that to be undone was denied. They supposedly have had access for 5 years without issues, and according to Tomaw it's something they'd "probably never do anything with."
Why should Andrew accept that, even if the only thing Freenode Ltd. owned was the domain and name? If they didn't do anything nefarious for 5 years, what changed that made the domain takeover now necessary? Especially since the person taking over the domain apparently admits Andrew wouldn't do anything to it... or was that exchange fabricated?
I've been reading more into it and it seems that wasn't the case [1], but that just leaves me with more questions.
[1]: https://gist.github.com/realrasengan/f569c5e4727d21eb939fff9...
(a) Freenode ltd had access to the domain
(b) Freenode ltd should have access to the domain
(c) Freenode ltd is the rightful owner of the domain
are three very different matters. How often do you whois your employer's domain?
Otherwise, if you've just been appointed leader of an operational staff and believe your organisation owns everything involved, it doesn't seem unreasonable to start introducing basic infosec practices around limiting access (or if it was caused by mandating security measures like 2fa, as mentioned elsewhere in thread)
Since I believe freenode to be completely community-owned apart from some holding company that's supposed to host a conference, at that point I might check our WHOIS records and maybe our own policies [2] and question who I'm actually volunteering for.
[1]: https://freenode.net/news/freenode-pia-changes
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180606130945/https://freenode....