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Comment by diath | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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