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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.

#81

Post by mst »

axod wrote: post #73
ankhmoop wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sec…

We (#perl) banned mib_* nicks and found anybody smart enough to type their own nickname in was generally fine. Plus we learned how to extract the original IP from the mibbit host string so we could nuke ban evaders comfortably even without freenode supporting WEBIRC.

In fact, we were planning to have mibbit links to freenode#perl showing up all sorts of places in the perl community to try and make it easier for people to get onto IRC and ask questions when they got stuck with things. I've notified the guys working on that to hang fire until we work out what the hell is going on.

Most annoying, whoever's fault it is (and being an argument on the internet I'm going to default to "everybody's, and especially mine, even if I wasn't involved" :)

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#82

Post by sho »

abstractbill wrote: post #51
ankhmoop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rather misleading. Mibbit may be a browser-based client, but it does pass on the user's IP to the remote ircd, which means exactly the same protections exist as for any other irc client. First, it's considerably easier to find open web proxies than it is to find IRC-capable proxies, and Freenode runs proxy detection to catch use of IRC-capable proxies. Second, trusting Mibbit's IP address reporting is a tall…

...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"

I know nothing about Mibbit beyond their web page and their colourful representative here, but - it's not about the personal integrity of the founder, or whatever. Mibbit's whole business model is around advertising. The more page views, the more advertising, the more profit. They have no investment in any other metric. It is reasonable to assume Mibbit does whatever they can think of to boost their usage.

"suggesting that there's an incentive to give Freenode false information about users' IP addresses"

There is a clear commercial incentive to encourage usage of the service. If sending random IPs to Freenode boosts revenue, there would be an incentive to do that. That would be reprehensible, of course, but you can't say there's no incentive.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#83

Post by froo »

swombat wrote: post #78
ankhmoop wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

without receiving any complaints

This is what you would call spin....

I too saw the same complaints.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#84

Post by sho »

abstractbill wrote: post #80
sho wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm. Still, 80k per box is nothing to sniff at, especially with Python.

I've been using Ruby's EventMachine, I can get it up to about C20k before it blows up, but that's local only, remains to be seen what proper connections will do. Haven't tried multiple processes yet. As for IPC I just dump everything into AMQP, whose fanout exchanges seem practically designed for IRC : D

Hm, anyway, thanks for the info. Really cool to hear python stretching that far.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#85

Post by ankhmoop »

swombat wrote: post #78
ankhmoop wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our channels, not #freenode.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#86

Post by vollmond »

swombat wrote: post #78
ankhmoop wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not too mention, a large proportion of those who would complain now have no means to do so.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#87

Post by swombat »

ankhmoop wrote: post #57
abstractbill wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anyone requiring that, but publicly calling into question the integrity of Mibbit without offering any evidence that they cannot be trusted is really bad karma imho.

Freenode has absolutely no innate responsibility to extend trust to a third party such as Mibbit. I see no reason to judge them poorly for failing to do so, or how this reflects on Mibbit's integrity.

Freenode, by their own definition (lifted from the google search result for "freenode"):

Provide a friendly interaction environment for project coordination and for the support of community projects.

Freenode, as a communication platform (and particularly as a self-described "friendly" environment) have a duty, to common sense and intelligence, to make reasonable efforts to encourage communication rather than stifle it.

Being willfully wooden-headed about this whole thing is not just wrong because of the unnecessary harm it causes, it's also self-contradictory.

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#88

Post by ankhmoop »

vollmond wrote: post #86
swombat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not too mention, a large proportion of those who would complain now have no means to do so.

Other than the vast quantity of available desktop clients, as well as the now-available freenode web IRC chat?

Re: Freenode has blocked the Mibbit client permanently.

#90

Post by swombat »

ankhmoop wrote: post #85
swombat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Our channels , not #freenode.

"Your honour, I thought he might object to being shot, but after I did it, he never ever raised the question! If that's not silent agreement, I don't know what is!"
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