I used to live on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.
IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
121–130 of 397 posts
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#122I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e encryption for private and group messages.
Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend end to end either)
In my opinion, a new end to end encrypted protocol that preserves the properties of IRC people like would be ideal.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#123Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different…
Weird, I felt physically compelled to upvote this just because I used to use IRC a lot. I regret that I had a lot of great BBS and IRC friends with whom I lost touch over the years.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. I'm a big fan of the federation of different IRC servers, but also like have rich media embeds and drag+drop image uploading, even if that currently means being tied into the discord servers.
But I think this is only a problem from a UX standpoint. IRC has DCC, for instance, but it's a matter of building a client which e.g. inlines DCC "attachments" or displays images beneath messages with links. If IRC is truly "revived" there's a chance IRC clients grow or new ones emerge to keep up with "modern" IM systems, and IRC will still have more benefits than these (openness, ubiquity...)
DCC has been broken in practice for decades due to NAT. If you use a bouncer and have workarounds for the NAT problem in place, your files will still end up on the wrong machine, and then there is the multi client distribution problem. That's a bunch of problems you need to solve beyond just showing an image "inline".
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard a lot of that, too – client devs getting approached and offered jobs with PIA. I’ve gotten an "offer" once, too, inofficially, but I assume it was just a joke from them.
What was the offer?
It never got that far. They asked if I’d be interested in a job with them, I said no, never, and it stopped there.
As said, I assume they didn’t mean it seriously.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now teach the other hundreds of thousands of ex-IRC users how to set up their own bouncer servers and get them to actually stick with it for any amount of time.
Exactly. "Just use a good client that's always online" doesn't change the fact that almost everyone else on IRC goes offline when they shut their laptop or into a tunnel and you can't even send them a message while they're offline. IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person wh…
IRCCloud solves everything you just mentioned.
The key is in the clients, not the protocol.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
he seems to be purchasing influence/control by offering "jobs" to the people in charge of various IRC projects, publicly: freenode[1], kiwiirc[2] (and presumably snoonet) -- I've been told there are others (not public info) he's also brought on board the disgraced mt. gox CEO as CTO -- what on earth is he up to? [1] https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn : "Some of you might also find yourselves dealing with me in my new r…
Kiwi IRC developer here that was sponsored and hired by LTM back in November, so I can give you a first hand account of how things are playing out. Andrew is very passionate about IRC as you can see from the post. Most people developing IRC projects do it in their spare time which makes progressing them difficult. This was my personal position back in November. Since I was hired, I have been able to work on Kiwi IRC,…
those are nice observations you have as his patron, but you didn't really answer my question
it's not normal for a self-described businessman to give out money for free: so what's his long term plan behind all of this?
> For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted.
this statement is so disingenuous it sounds like the product of a PR department
running a large IRC network in 2018 can be done on AWS/GCP for hobby scale money, so it's not as if freenode risks disappearing without his patronage... however your/christel's income would, hence my (and others) concerns about the purchase of influence
(personally: if my "employer" hired Karpeles as their CTO I'd be out of there so fast it'd make your head spin)
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#128I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e encryption for private and group messages. Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can…
Isn't IRC compatible with e2e? I could see it working at a "transport" layer, with additional commands to import, export and view keys.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#129Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different…
I resent that you resent "average people".
I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who can't even agree on a feature set between each other, and can't produce a single decent mobile client.
Same goes for XMPP.
BTW, it's extremely hard to make a decent product for the "average user". Self-proclaimed über-men should try it sometime.