How did IRC ping timeouts end up in a lawsuit? | Hacker News Reader

How did IRC ping timeouts end up in a lawsuit?

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

158 pointsdvaun32 comments

Wow, I read the linked case ( https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063 ) and the High Court judge's ruling has a remarkably strong and thorough discussion of both modern Internet forum culture and the law. Really interesting writing.

A whole other part of this argument that could be made is about the inherent assumption that a ping timeout is caused by an event that only affects one machine.

For sure. Having lived on IRC for a while many years ago, I assure any bystanders that this is assuredly not always the case.

Ergo isn't a federated server, it's meant to scale vertically

The internet is a "federated" network though, so their point still applies.

No, Ergo doesn't have netsplits because there isn't anything to split with. The point does not apply.

There are events that may affect more than one machine which are not netsplits.

e.g. an ISP with common users experiences an outage, an IRC client with common users has a bug, common users within the same time zone have automated system updates run at the same time, the IRC server experiences an upstream network disruption affecting only some routes, a regional power outage occurs, a hosted bouncer service with common users has an outage, etc, etc, etc...

Imagine them trying to sue every person on one side of a netsplit

...and back in my day (yeah I am becoming an old fart), it was dead simple to cause a netsplit on most networks.

I'll admit to sending a couple of the messages that made Linksys routers restart. I also set up automatic k-lines on Snoonet for these very strings, years ago

Glad to see a case that could've very easily gone sideways due to its technical nature come out right.

The facts were never argued, the other party failed to follow procedure.

After "being warned of the consequences on multiple occasions the Schestowitzes never provided any witness statements", so that's hardly Matthew's fault.

Yeah but that means that the “court said I’m right ” rhetoric is invalid. It’s as if you said that a no bill or dismissal proved your innocence: it doesn’t.

Now although I have only superficial understanding of the case at stake I believe the author nonetheless (but with a weak certainty until I hear the other side).

I think it is imprecise to say that the facts were not argued - they were! As the judge writes in paragraph 58,

> The authorship or control of these accounts has consistently been strenuously denied by Dr Garrett. I have no evidence from the Defendants to support it. Instead, they necessarily rely on an inferential case built on a limited number of pleaded facts, some of which are undisputed. I consider them in turn.

There were not _witness statements_ presented by the defense in support of myriad facts, but it's not like the case for the defense wasn't made at all.

> There were not _witness statements_ presented by the defense in support of myriad facts, but it's not like the case for the defense wasn't made at all.

It kind of wasn't. In UK civil cases your witness statement takes the place of your testimony on the stand (only cross exam is done on the stand). Outside of your witness statement(s) the other material in your case (e.g. random pleadings and inter-parties correspondence) aren't made under the same penalties for perjury.

So if you're going to tell a bunch of lies in your case (ill advised, for sure) then you're best off to do it via all other means and avoid ever producing a witness statement.

But as a result it's also important for the judge to generally discard such positions when not supported by material attested to in a way with serious consequences.

This vaguely reminds me of years ago when a friend got hit at an intersection and went to court to fight that he wasn't at fault. I ran the numbers a bit and found that whoever hit him would've been moving at a very high though not outlandish (think maybe 60mph in a 30mph or something) speed. But they never showed up and he won by default

> He was awarded substantial damages of £70,000 and was also awarded his costs.

I could do with £70,000 - I'm suing you for your comment of making me jealous of £70k.

This is pretty funny and reminds me of when some company in the US tried to sue someone for copyright infringement. The evidence they offered up was just screenshots of IP addresses, not even a packet log of the traffic in question.

Why do I get a 403 when trying to read this? My IP is from Brazil, don’t see a reason to be geoblocked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

403 Error.

We need Techrights to expose corrupted institutions like the European Patent Office.

Trying to bankrupt them with defamation lawsuits does not help.

I'm curious what you think the correct response to defamation is? At multiple opportunities (including the morning of the trial) Roy and Rianne were given the option of just removing the defamatory material and apologising and having the case dropped without having to pay anything. This is in no way my preferred outcome.

Will read the court decision during Xmas time.

As a side note, my organization FFII eV was sued for defamation for criticizing patent trolling companies in the past:

https://edri.org/our-work/edrigramnumber3-16ffii/

My position was always to correct the statements, stick to the facts, and avoid wasting money on lawyers.

I'd have been entirely happy with that outcome, and I sent Roy and Rianne emails asking for that before getting lawyers involved. Even then, the initial request was just for correction - we offered to settle several times after the case started, and Roy documented his refusal in https://techrights.org/n/2025/11/04/We_Turned_Down_Every_Set... . As I said, these efforts continued until the morning of the trial, when I explicitly told my lawyers to make an offer that would involve Roy and Rianne paying nothing.

The way English court costs work is that if someone offers a settlement that would be more favourable than the court eventually orders (ie, the defendant could have settled for less than the damages the court orders, or the claimant could have settled for more than the damages the court orders) and that settlement is refused, then additional damages and costs are due as a consequence of refusing the early settlement offer and costing everyone more money. But for this to work, the court cannot be told about the settlement offer until afterwards - otherwise the judge could be influenced. As a result, there won't be any discussion of settlement offers in the judgement.

(This does have an unfortunate consequence - a defendant who wants to keep a case out of court can make a settlement offer that's higher than the court is likely to offer, and if the claimant refuses then the entire exercise ends up being much more expensive)

This seems like a case where some application of Game theory would lead to a prediction of an unusual outcome being the most common one.

Ironically I think the technical analysis argues that he could infact be guilty.

He goes from, 11 seconds is a big gap to, anything within 90 seconds could be the same person.

The real question is, how often did the timeouts coincide.

Your assumption is that a 11 second delta is a somewhat better evidence than a 90 seconds delta, but the provided article successfully defended this isn't the case IMO. It depends on the last activity of the user

The article also shows that there's a 40 second delta between the harassing account and the harassed person himself, further semonstrating this doesn't mean anything and can happen purely by chance

I do agree, though, that a pattern of synchronized account activity actually suggests something more than a single example.

To be pedantic: it depends on the last activity of the client, not the user. Anything the client sends counts, even if it's not as a result of user action. This makes it incredibly hard to figure out what could reset that timer - you'd need to know the user's client, its configuration, its plugins and so on.

It does not. He said that if we're using approximately similar times to establish identity, then by using that logic, it could also establish that Schestowitz was that alleged sockpuppet account. (Transitively, does that mean Garrett and Schestowitz are the same person? Have we ever seen them in a room together? Hmm.)

But honestly, anyone who ever spent any amount of time on IRC is used to seeing 50 people drop from a channel at once. That was usually due to netsplits, which isn't the case here since there was only one IRC server involved, but that wasn't the only cause. "Uh-oh, the IRC server got too laggy and couldn't service all requests within the configured timeout. Time to disconnect everyone!"

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