Freenode has blocked all IRCCloud users | Hacker News Reader

Freenode has blocked all IRCCloud users

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240 pointskemayo100 comments

Possible reasons for the ban:

- IRCCloud publicly tweeting mean things about Freenode: https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/1397475744448663564

- IRCCloud effectively “competing” with Freenode’s new bouncer service (bnc.freenode.net): https://freenode.net/#freenode-bouncer-stay-connected-on-irc..., also see this IRC exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27494124

The timing does suggest that Freenode put off banning IRCCloud until they had an alternative (their bouncer) in place. Obviously, a terrible move and one that should accelerate their implosion.

Side note: amusing that their help page on IRCCloud (https://freenode.net/kb/answer/irccloud) is still up given their recent website purge.

From the freenode bouncer link:

> freenode is the home of FOSS, so of course it's powered by open source.

Not any more it ain't.

Freenode's BNC is free, it should have no problem competing with a paid service like IRCcloud.

The value proposition of irccloud is that you only need that one client. Among other things. Seriously doubt people will see freebie’s bouncer service as an alternative at all.

>IRCCloud publicly tweeting mean things about Freenode Mean things like telling the truth?

I don't think it's so clearly a terrible move. In some respects, IRCcloud is like a metastasized cancer, growing in user count and connecting to every ircd, then moving all that communications traffic through a central service. That's antithetical to the idea of self-hosted, private chat networks which irc allows for. Allowing irccloud makes me think "should have just used discord".

Edit: Okay, on reflection, I was being harsh and... incurious, maybe hyperbolic. Being able to freely connect to a service with whatever client you want is important, maybe especially so for Freenode. I'm still concerned with IRCcloud's effect on the "ecosystem", if you will.

And here I was thinking the beauty of IRC was that it's an open platform people can connect to however they like.

You are correct. It's about choices, and the fact of irccloud not having the same choices a proprietary protocol/client vendor would have available to hurt users.

That's part of it, and may be the most important thing for Freenode, but is the self-hosted and non-centralized part really lost on HN readers?

You do realize Freenode, Libera, etc, all the big networks, are not self hosted, and that all traffic goes through them, right?

"All traffic" only goes through them in aggregate, because they are separate. You're saying they're not "self-hosted" because... why? They are independently hosted, that's the same thing. So, I realize there are several big, but separate networks that are part of the makeup of the ircd space. IRCCloud is bigger and spreads across lots of them, including many of the small ones.

By your argument Facebook is self-hosted because they host it themselves.

There's only one set of Facebook implementations.

I think smoulder means "it's a documented protocol with competing client and server implementations" when they say "it's self hosted".

There's only one Facebook. Other groups and individuals apart from Freenode host their own ircds, so I consider ircd to be in the category of self-hosted things, even if sometimes it is a large "self" like Freenode.

I detected a hint of sarcasm

> That's antithetical to the idea of self-hosted, private chat networks which irc allows for.

It seems odd to hold both the “we should use de-centralized (or less centralized) systems” and “users MUST use these systems and no others” at the same time.

People find utility in IRCCloud - I know I did (when I used it) as it helped me keep up + provided a good mobile experience on top of that. IRCCloud existing doesn’t take away from those who wish to connect directly or use their own bouncers.

It does take away from users who want to directly join a private channel. As soon as a channel is joined by an irccloud user, that channel becomes transparent to irccloud, a big, opaque, centralized service who is a giant attack surface for broadly spying on irc servers.

Unfortunately, the privacy model of an IRC private channel is only as private as the privacy precautions taken by members of the private channel.

Someone could run a ZNC bouncer on their own server, and have it connect to Freenode. Then, they could connect to their own bouncer using the IRCCloud web client - effectively gaining access to Freenode via IRCCloud, and Freenode would never 'know' IRCCloud is 'listening' in on the channel.

That's a good point.

In case anyone's curious, here's the ban message I got:

    Disconnected: You are banned from this server- IRCCloud is no longer welcome on freenode (2021/6/13 12.46)

I'm not sure why this is happening now. It was almost three weeks ago that IRCCloud warned about the risks of channel takeovers on Freenode.[1] It seems rather petty (not to mention incredibly self-destructive) to ban all IRCCloud users because of that.

1. https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/1397475744448663564

> I'm not sure why this is happening now.

Dictatorial regimes are not always as efficient as they think or want others to believe. In fact they usually aren't on some scales.

Other explanations could include, plain madness, delusions of importance, etc.

Or maybe someone intends for freenode to fail.

LOL. The whole freenode drama should be taught a few years later on "how to shoot a service in the head in a month".

Dictating what clients can connect to your protocol based system is plain, dead wrong.

EDIT: I realized @rasengan renamed himself to @root. May I suggest @Nero for burning it all down instead?

I guess it took Digg slightly longer.

It also had a much bigger user base.

And wasn't already in the midst of a decades-long decline in casual users.

There's a comment on the earlier Goodbye Freenode post sharing some quotes from Lee indicating that he's got some sort of vendetta with IRCCloud: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27494025

Specifically:

  <@root> irc cloud is banned cuz fck irc cloud
  <@root> this was not an accident
  <@root> not a mistake
  <@root> actually it was supposed to happen a logn time ago

    <@root> Anyone who needs a bnc bnc.freenode.net 6697 nickname:pass (nickserv nick/pass)

Vendetta? Competing offering.

I think the competing offering stems from the vendetta.

Based on the timeline I've seen, IRCCloud took a side on the Libera split on twitter, so Lee took a few weeks to roll out the Freenode BNC and then promptly k-lined IRCCloud.

Freenode staff and Andrew Lee is calling IRCCloud a "MITM service":

    <@root> > if irccloud functioned like AndChat or any other client and didn't route all of your private communications through its MITM servers it would probably not have been banned <-- +1

I wonder what they think about PIA.

Or that the "BNC" service they are launching is also by definition a MITM

That's how any bouncer (or shell) works.

Ah, but you see, that's hosted by the server operators, so it's fine. I mean, er, decentralised.

to be fair, that does mean it doesn't add an additional party who can spy on all communication

No, only freenode. Do we consider them trustworthy?

No! But adding another party adds a another risk, however tiny! And uh I guess ignoring that irccloud is probably gonna have invested more into security than the geniuses behind the "hm maybe we should ban irccloud" operation, but, that's just details!

Of course! Why, only two months ago it was among the most trustworthy public IRC networks in existence.

IRC in general would be a MITM, no? I don't know the network geometry, I assume every message goes via the IRC server rather than peer-to-peer. Seems like a decision a user should legitimately make for themselves.

Yes, unless the messages are sent via DCC.

I think all of this conflict will just cause most users to abandon IRC altogether for Slack or Discord. Points of prolonged disruption are where people start to seriously evaluate jumping to different platforms, even if they were previously interested in mission or tech of IRC.

In my experience, it feels like 90% of Freenode channels have moved to Libera, 5% have moved to OFTC, and 5% have moved to something else like Discord or "just use GitHub issues" or whatever.

Certainly the number of moves to Libera is high enough that in practice the Freenode community/userbase is more or less also on Libera (turns out IRC clients can connect to multiple networks easily). So if you want the old community it's there; if you happen to want to target a different community anyway (and perhaps you were experimenting with these options already), Discord and Slack and so forth are there.

Hm, with the channels I'm in, it's more 50/50 for libera vs OFTC. OFTC now has Asahi, Meson, and the whole graphics stack (dri-devel, intel-gfx, radeon, wayland…)

OFTC already had a significant kernel dev presence, so a lot of us in this niche gravitated towards there. The broader open source community definitely skewed more towards Libera, though. Which is fine, diversity is good!

Element/matrix I'm sure will get a boost. Many IRC users are wary of Slack and Discord

Libera's Matrix bridge seems to already work better than Freenode's.

Indeed, joining a Libera channel from Matrix is as simple as joining #channel:libera.chat. It’s much simpler and cleaner than the Freenode bridge.

What’s wrong with discord?

It’s not a lot different from irc if you are using it for chatting in channels.

Edit: okay I get it.

It's not FOSS (neither client nor server), you can't control any of the infrastructure (and therefore guarantee any level of privacy), sovereignty of the data, the data itself, and policies for use which may not align with your own.

All before you get into the technical differences in applications and protocols - good and bad.

The biggest issue I personally have with Discord is that everyone has a "server". And that server has 42 highly specific channels on it. And it has as many bots as Snow White had dwarves.

...and it has less users than channels.

Discord should have a "lobby" server where every small group could have a (private, invite only by default) channel. After they have enough people they could upgrade that to a full server.

But it's too late now and I already have 50 Discord servers on my client, of those maybe 4-5 have over 50 people on them. The rest have more channels than members.

The problem with proprietary chat services is that if, for instance, Discord pulls a Freenode you need to look for an entirely different app to migrate. With IRC or any federated network for that matter you point to a different server and its business as usual. See how fast everything moved over to Libera over the past few weeks.

One could put a tinfoil hat on and argue that it was a deliberate move precisely to force people onto platforms that collaborate with 3 letter agencies.

I can't believe IRC folks are _still_ using three-letter agencies as a justification for their management like 30 years later, in the face of not using SSL for decades and private messaging passwords to a user/bot named NickServ. If you want to hold onto a (more passionate) version of what IRC used to be, be my guest, but lets drop this useless rhetoric. Please stop LARPing freedom fighter.

I have been connecting to IRC using SSL for well over a decade. SASL authentication is also a thing for many years now (and most clients support it out of the box). There are channel settings one can set to prohibit people entering from non-secure connections as well (in cases where the network still allows non-ssl connections).

However it's not unreasonable to assume that most three-letter agencies (and perhaps some companies) will simply have bots silently sitting in most large public channels (if those channels don't have public logs anyway).

As opposed to the well-secured IRC?

Though, one can also migrate to Matrix.

> As opposed to the well-secured IRC?

It's less about the protocol itself and more about the community/culture, I trust tech savvy people more to care about privacy than profit-driven platforms like Discord.

I'm sure that the culture is very privacy/tech savvy, but Freenode even couldn't be bothered to enforce TLS on all connections. There's no need for overt collaboration at that point since communication is just wide-open for spying.

It appeals primarily to a subset of Web 1.0 enthusiasts.

I've saved every single IRC log since 2003 on every channel I've been on.

They're all fully searchable and indexed on a private psql instance.

You mean like the tech savvy people that ran the encrypted platform Anom?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fbi-sting-using-anom-platform-l...

I have never stated that things run by tech savvy people make things inherently secure; they make things *more likely* to be secure/privacy oriented, especially if you consider the fact that somebody would be more likely to speak up about potential foul play if they're a volunteering enthusiast rather than if they're working for a for-profit company that would just tell them to shut up or get fired and deal with the legal consequences.

Actual quote from Andrew Lee:

[19:44:54] <@root> mst: If you really need a comment, just say root said, "fck irc cloud"

Full logs:

https://dpaste.com/9WAUTQ34B

It almost seems like their goal is to tank Freenode as fast as possible.

I'm fairly certain that literally doing nothing at all after the takeover / Libera-split news broke would have been incredibly better for them. Just... hunker down, don't touch any policies, or do anything beyond normal maintenance for three months or so.

I bet things would have died down, with far less migration off Freenode. Even if they started to do these current objectionable things later, the momentum would be gone.

This is what makes the current situation so amazing. Literally not doing anything apart from keeping the servers up would be infinitely better.

Yeah... it's rather sad. It's like a kid kicking down a sand castle just out of spite...

No, he is kicking down the sand castle because the other kids did not want to play with him.

More like pissing on the sand castle and getting mad when nobody wants to play.

Freenode has more cultural cachet than that. It's more like burning a library.

I am not really in the FOSS space, but Andrew Lee increasingly seems like a comic book villain.

But emphasis on the "comic", because at least as an outsider this is hilarious.

It seriously seems like he bought an office and as soon as tenants had concerns, he set the building on fire.

Even funnier: given that Freenode proper wasn't ever for sale, he only legitimately bought the office's trademark and postal address.

if anything, for alienating so many users.

It is a bit sad to see the place where I had a lot of memory destroy itself. But then again, I'm glad that they are showing their intention to monetize so bluntly, which may give the audience enough reasons to avoid the service.

It's still there!

libera.chat has pretty much all the original community. Just the name "freenode" has been hijacked.

it's just an address, not a place. Move on to where the community has moved to and don't worry about the branding.

This is all the more baffling because IRC was always a niche and with the rise of Slack (and Stackexchange, too) it became an even smaller niche. What's there worth fighting for in 2021?

This may or not be linked to with the release of the free freenode bnc 4 days ago: https://freenode.net/news/taking-irc-further

According to this tweet, the ban was not a mistake:

https://mobile.twitter.com/daemon404/status/1404153038978306...

"Connection closed unexpectedly: You are banned from this server- IRCCloud is no longer welcome on freenode (2021/6/13 12.46)"

Interesting to note that mIRC still has Freenode as a "Popular" network available by default:

https://www.mirc.com/servers.html

So Freenode will likely continue to grow (to some degree) prosper with newbies joining.

Re: https://forums.mirc.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/266257/mirc-se... - from 2019

Looks like we finally learned what "fuck you money" means. What an aspiring ideal.

IRC Cloud did a great job of making IRC useable and added a lot of value to Freenode.

I would pay good money just to know what the F is in their mind.

Lee has to destroy Freenode to save it.

Ironically, the topic of #freenode on Freenode is currently: End of an era - “In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.” -- Octavia Butler

Phoenixes don’t exist. Which is why when they burn freenode, nothing will arise from the ashes.

That's a bold strategy, cotton, let's see how it works out for them.

Wow.

There have been some weird messages from the dude lately, the latest was

> "<root> The community on IRC is made up of some of the smartest, most beautiful people in the world. It's been an honor to be here with you all, friends and foes. We've been waiting for IRC's return for quite some time -- and for you, we deliver. A new genesis is taking place uncovering a new era. Freedom, and the people, shall rise to power. Freedom is not dead, it lives, here, with freenode."

This sounds like the message you'd hear booming over loudspeakers in a shelled out, dystopian regime.

He does claim to be Korean royalty, so this checks out.

We have to kill freenode, or else it'll die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvJKUQ0dDoU

power

I think they want to use freenode.net for something else. Maybe something blockchainy

With a domain having "node" in it, that idea sounds lovely.

Yes cryptocoin + tor like thing or something :>

Lee did everything he could to get rid of all users of freenode, but why?

Have I ever seen something so big getting destroyed so fast…

This is disgusting.

Let's say I start an IRCCloud clone called IRCWorld. People start using it, and it becomes very popular. It's very convenient. Lots and lots of people are now using it to connect to EFNet. People sometimes use IRCWorld to abuse EFnet, but I try really hard to make it easy for EFnet to work with me to handle problems. One day, EFNet is like, F** IRCWorld, this is just too much of a hassle - we don't owe them anything - we've GLINE'd entire networks before, this is no different, and IRCWorld is now banned. Do you have sympathy for my little pet project "IRCWorld" getting blocked off EFnet? Or do you sympathize with EFNet for being tired of it?

Personally, I think the IRCCloud's branding and marketing makes it seem like they are more of an "authority" than they really are. No IRC Network owes them anything. Yes, Fewer people might connect to their IRC Network if they can't use IRCCloud, but that seems to be a part of a calculated decision on the part of the IRC network. At the end of the day, just imagine IRCCloud is just some random site like Mibbit, or even my fake "IRCWorld" example - and it's easier to realize the entire debacle is melodramatic and absurd. It reminds me of when Twitter made the grandiose statement saying "We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society." - It's self-important and self-serving drivel. They want to keep the $$$ rolling in, and this is a rain cloud on their parade.

As an aside, IRCCloud's tweet suggesting that users "switch to a network that is secure" is absurd if someone is going to be using IRCCloud in the first place. You're willfully engaging with what is technically a man in the middle service - you have to TRUST IRCCloud is a safe actor. 'Security' is not a priority here, but convenience is.

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