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Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

blog.mibbit.com

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Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#71

Post by [deleted] »

ankhmoop wrote: post #56
abstractbill wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it would allow Mibbit to readily spoof basic user identity. What conceivable reason would Mibbit have for doing that? Mibbit must be trusted to ... not allow proxy connections No, that's not true. Mibbit must be trusted merely to pass-on the correct IP. Then Freenode's existing proxy detection can handle the job of rejecting proxied connections. You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here, and s…

You are publicly calling into question Mibbit's integrity here, and suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses. Why? Regardless of Mibbit's integrity -- of which I have no opinion, and am not calling into question -- freenode has absolutely no responsibility (contractual, moral, or otherwise) to extend their trust to any third party. If Mibbit wishes to resolve t…

[deleted]

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#72

Post by ankhmoop »

swombat wrote: post #69
ankhmoop wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving past the heated conjecture, the more accurate statement from a freenode staffer: njan: Xenos, for what it delivered, mibbit i) disrupted a large number of our network users, and ii) used a disproportionate amount of staff time. njan: Xenos, we chose a solution that fixed those two problems - using staff time and disrupting our 50k users - whilst giving the mibbit users an alternative.

My nose hurts from time to time. Maybe I should cut it off.

Freenode doesn't need -- or have any responsibility to support -- Mibbit. Moreover, we've banned mibbit entirely from our channels without receiving any complaints or noticing any significant drop in channel traffic.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#73

Post by axod »

ankhmoop wrote: post #70
axod wrote: post #62

This is a sad thing in terms of Freenode, and users trying to access it from Mibbit, but will not affect Mibbit as such. I remember using Freenode early on when I discovered open source. It was a fantastic vibrant place with hackers all over the place. openprojects, lilo, great... Unfortunately, maybe it's got too big. The atmosphere has changed for the worse IMHO. In my opinion, the staff no longer represent the com…

Today, they put their own ideals ahead of their users. Their objections to Mibbit have been: It's not open source, It makes money Working with Mibbit clearly costs freenode time and resources that they would rather not spend. Since Mibbit makes money, perhaps you should consider entering into a contractual relationship to provide them with financial incentive and other guarantees, in exchange for their investment in…

I offered to sponsor servers, to help with coding, etc many many times. My emails were ignored. When I popped into #freenode to ask, they said "We assumed you wanted something in return so we ignored them".

I also offered to help with the abuse. I've asked several times for details of abuse. I haven't been able to get concrete details on what abuse happens, when, what they have to do etc. The staff are incredibly secretive - unlike other networks, they don't link servers, their staff run everything, and I believe this was one of the reasons - they want complete control over everything including web clients.

Out of 500 or so people @peak times, I think the abuse level was really low. Also it's easily solved with a WEBIRC setup which we have with a large number of IRC networks (Which we never hear from, because abuse is handled by WEBIRC and their own systems as with direct connections).

I hope freenode will decide to reconsider, but they clearly want people to use their own web client, rather than mibbit. It would have been nice to at least give people some notice rather than just shut off access.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#74

Post by Jem »

ankhmoop wrote: post #42
sho wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Elitist cack" Not at all. It's like a short, basic aptitude test before you're able to join a recreational sports team, or maybe a driving test. Just shows that you know the ropes at least a bit, you have at least basic competence. Remove that and people can just bomb in on anyone's conversation in real time, from any browser, no consequences, nothing. Is that really what you want? I object to your use of the word "…

Personally, I'd prefer to see reasoned responses to sho's comments, rather than sniping remarks ("elitist cack"), and downvoting into oblivion. I tend to agree with sho, and alternative, reasoned viewpoints would be enlightening.

Right, because insinuating anyone who uses mibbit is incapable of installing an IRC client is not a sniping remark?

I have no problem with basic aptitude tests. I have no problem with restricting a community to the technically literate. What I have a problem with is the assumption that anyone choosing to use X over Y is some kind of moron.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#75

Post by daleharvey »

ankhmoop wrote: post #70
axod wrote: post #62

This is a sad thing in terms of Freenode, and users trying to access it from Mibbit, but will not affect Mibbit as such. I remember using Freenode early on when I discovered open source. It was a fantastic vibrant place with hackers all over the place. openprojects, lilo, great... Unfortunately, maybe it's got too big. The atmosphere has changed for the worse IMHO. In my opinion, the staff no longer represent the com…

Today, they put their own ideals ahead of their users. Their objections to Mibbit have been: It's not open source, It makes money Working with Mibbit clearly costs freenode time and resources that they would rather not spend. Since Mibbit makes money, perhaps you should consider entering into a contractual relationship to provide them with financial incentive and other guarantees, in exchange for their investment in…

a contractual obligation is exactly the type of hassle I believe they are trying to avoid.

freenode deals with a lot of closed source and for profit projects, the idea that the ban is purely for those reasons is "very" far fetched.

the freenode admins have said multiple times that they will be happy to reverse their position as they have in the past

the entire problem seems to be down to a lack of communication between mibbit and freenode, and both sides have blamed each other for the miscommunication.

after witnessing axods attempt at communicating, and seeing freenode communicating find with a large number of other partners, Its fairly reasonable to assume axod needs to the communication issues sorted at his end.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#76

Post by swombat »

ankhmoop wrote: post #70
axod wrote: post #62

This is a sad thing in terms of Freenode, and users trying to access it from Mibbit, but will not affect Mibbit as such. I remember using Freenode early on when I discovered open source. It was a fantastic vibrant place with hackers all over the place. openprojects, lilo, great... Unfortunately, maybe it's got too big. The atmosphere has changed for the worse IMHO. In my opinion, the staff no longer represent the com…

Today, they put their own ideals ahead of their users. Their objections to Mibbit have been: It's not open source, It makes money Working with Mibbit clearly costs freenode time and resources that they would rather not spend. Since Mibbit makes money, perhaps you should consider entering into a contractual relationship to provide them with financial incentive and other guarantees, in exchange for their investment in…

As I understand it, axod offered financial incentives aplenty but freenode wasn't interested.

Freenode's position seems to be that they will never trust any third party, no matter what that third party does. The most oft-repeated argument on #freenode was not about the hassle of dealing with bad users (everyone, including axod, agreed with the sentiment of mibbit and freenode working together to resolve those), but that it was actually not possible for mibbit to do anything to resolve that problem.

I'm sure you don't like to hear that, but I sat on that channel for a long while reading what was being said, and Freenode were behaving like a bunch of power-tripping bureaucrats. Every time axod, or anyone else, asked "what can mibbit do, concretely, to make you happy?" the answer was either "make mibbit open-source" or "nothing", or, "axod should have discussed this with us a year ago, it's too late now".

It's a real shame for an IRC network with the legacy of freenode to behave like that. I had a lot of respect for freenode prior to this, but I don't have much left after today. The sad thing is it wouldn't take much effort on the part of freenode to regain that respect... so I'm hoping you and your freenode colleagues come to a saner decision and work with axod to resolve this in an amicable fashion.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#77

Post by ken »

froo wrote: post #34
Tichy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the official reason?

People abusing mibbit webchat to cause strife http://blog.freenode.net/2009/06/new-freenode-webchat-and-wh... Honestly, freenode is loaded up with tech savvy users. This will solve nothing. If users want to cause strife on channels, the tool they use is inconsequential. Below are two scenario's off the top of my head. Scenario #1 - people will be using proxies and using freenode's webchat client = banning mibbit was…

I think the tool required to access a service is pretty darned important in determining your audience. Case 1: September 1993 (AOL on USENET). Case 2: Hacker News (intentionally plain design compared to, e.g., Reddit or Digg).

Scenario #0: people will keep using mibbit, because it's convenient and what they used before, and harass IRC channels on other networks instead.

(Sure enough, freenode's web client looks like basically a teletype in a web browser, while Mibbit's is big and flashy and web 2.0-ish. It's the HN to Mibbit's Digg.)

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#78

Post by swombat »

ankhmoop wrote: post #72
swombat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My nose hurts from time to time. Maybe I should cut it off.

Freenode doesn't need -- or have any responsibility to support -- Mibbit. Moreover, we've banned mibbit entirely from our channels without receiving any complaints or noticing any significant drop in channel traffic.

without receiving any complaints

That's a ridiculous statement. I was in the #freenode channel for a few hours, I saw many people (other than the people coming from #startups) who were logging in to ask why Mibbit wasn't working.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#79

Post by sho »

abstractbill wrote: post #58
menloparkbum wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incidentally, having personally written the software behind an irc network that's bigger than freenode From what I've read in your comments in the past, I'm assuming you used Twisted for the IRC backend. I was wondering, if you were starting this project today, would you still use Twisted? (apologies for veering off topic)

Yes, I used Twisted as the non-blocking network substrate for JTV chat. Actually in the initial implementation I used their IRC protocol library too, but that has been gradually dropped and replaced as more and more problems have been found. This is my general impression of Twisted actually - as an i/o core, it's rock-solid, but the protocol libraries are much more rough and many have clearly not been tested under si…

Are you saying that in your real-world experience, Twisted can handle over 360K simultaneous connections?

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#80

Post by abstractbill »

sho wrote: post #79
abstractbill wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I used Twisted as the non-blocking network substrate for JTV chat. Actually in the initial implementation I used their IRC protocol library too, but that has been gradually dropped and replaced as more and more problems have been found. This is my general impression of Twisted actually - as an i/o core, it's rock-solid, but the protocol libraries are much more rough and many have clearly not been tested under si…

Are you saying that in your real-world experience, Twisted can handle over 360K simultaneous connections?

Not on a single box, no - we run these machines in a cluster. Each chat machine scales up to a bit more than 80k simultaneous connections (each machine runs 8 processes, each of which can do about 10k simultaneous). There's some amount of IPC between all the chat processes in the cluster, but not too much, which means we can pretty much scale linearly just by adding hardware at this point.
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