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Leaving Freenode for a new network

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Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#221

Post by gojomo »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #120
gojomo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not fully up on the controversy, but I suspect because it implied the "freenode IRC network" is something that can be "owned" - when it's more complicated than that. (A company can be owned, legally, sure, but an ongoing-set-of-relationships, & mostly-volunteer processes, is usually something more than property with neat property-title.)

Realistically, the infrastructure for the servers can be replace and when that is done there is a high chance >75% of the users remain. There will always be other people willing to volunteer. I remember the AOL ICQ IRC had volunteer opers and there is no way you can think that wasn't fully a for-profit setup.

If your analysis centers on 'servers', I think you're missing the point of concerns about describing an "IRC network" as being "purchased", and other aspects that make some Freenode channels interesting.

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#222

Post by nabakin »

wut42 wrote: post #180
88 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understood of the previous (draft) resignation notes, there was a misunderstanding/disagreement over what (if any) Freenode assets actually belonged to that limited company.

Tomaw fought legally with Lee to get the sale contract from what I've read; and apparently it _does_ legitimately own the network.

I've read a lot of chat logs and so far I've only seen Andrew try to claim he owns the whole network, domain, copyrights, etc whereas it seems he only owns freenode Ltd which owns the domain that has a client to the irc network. The volunteer staff of the irc network say the irc network itself is hosted on servers owned by sponsors of the network who are not affiliated with freenode Ltd. Up to what I read, they were still trying to figure out if freenode Ltd owned the copyright/trademarks for freenode. Was this from newer chat logs then?

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#223

Post by almostbasic »

IceWreck wrote: post #5

I just got a message from the staff on freenode: [Global Notice] Hi all. It feels like my moral responsibility to inform all users that administrative control of freenode and its user data will soon change hands, and I will be resigning from freenode staff effective immediately. It's been an honour to help you all. Sad to see a hostile takeover of Freenode. Its controlled by Private Internet Access now.

Private Internet Access has no connection to Freenode at all anymore. It WAS owned by London Trust Media, which also owned PIA, but Kape acquired PIA in December of 2019 and has had no connection since then. We do not have any involvement or knowledge of any takeover of Freenode.

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#224

Post by nabakin »

Chris2048 wrote: post #206
wut42 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tomaw fought legally with Lee to get the sale contract from what I've read; and apparently it _does_ legitimately own the network.

By "network", do you mean the domains? What did the sale contract say?

He means the irc network. The servers which one connects to when using irc. The freenode network is an irc network that one can connect to in order to chat but there's a freenode domain that acts as a client to the network which it seems freenode Ltd (of which Andrew is now the only member on the board) owns

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#225

Post by dspillett »

danpalmer wrote: post #23

I don't know about the process of the sale/takeover of Freenode, but I'm a long time PIA user and have a fair amount of trust and goodwill for London Trust Media (the owner of PIA and now Freenode). - PIA is much better designed for privacy than many competitors - They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing - They have been fairly open with how their tech…

> They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing

Do you mean the "hide your IP address <from vague/unspecified parties for similarly vague/unspecified reasons" stuff? Because over time I've heard many paid sponsorship shout-outs (and also direct adverts) in podcasts & youtube clips to PIA quoting that and related stuff.

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#226

Post by Macha »

xfitm3 wrote: post #208
Macha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that nickserv is just another user and you can't be sure the network had taken precaution to avoid another using swiping the name in the event of a services outage is a problem. Add to that the (now admittedly rare) networks that don't use any form of nickserv and the phishing potential for users that don't realise that

The hostname mask is used to authenticate users. If someone can impersonate a hostname mask there are bigger problems. Nicknames are ephemeral. It is designed to be this way. You can use SASL and connect with a certificate to give yourself a fingerprint to validate your identity. It's fun and simple. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

However, people or their clients use /msg NickServ. The passwords are sent to something identified by a nick only. I don't believe you if you claim people are doing a /who NickServ and checking the hostname mask first.

SASL is definitely an improvement over NickServ.

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#227

Post by josteink »

This story is just so I’m clear and leaves me full of questions. It’s a complete mess, despite the numerous semi-official statements trying to clear things up.

Things I’m wondering about:

- why was freenode being sold in the first place?

- for what was it sold? For money? And who was paid for the sale?

- Did whatever freenode was sold for go back to support the IRC-network? Or did someone weasel it away for themselves?

- why would anyone buy and IRC network? What did they expect to gain by owning the network?

- Why was a volunteer-run IRC network even registered as a business which could be sold?

Can anyone please help me understand?

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#228

Post by moshmosh »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #177
vlmutolo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't check, other people should know that this is extremely misleading. > Fewer clients, way more complex protocol This is actually a valid complaint, though it's partly due to Matrix being pretty young. The other part is that Matrix does a lot more for you than IRC (eg e2ee and federation) and those extra features require complexity. > The identity server is centralized This is a completely optional par…

> This one is way off. Synapse, the "one complete server" you must be referring to, is going to be deprecated. The Matrix Foundation team is working on Dendrite to replace it. I hugely disagree. I have tried to setup a "homeserver". Synapse is huge beast, complex, CPU and memory-hungry, hard to setup (no, a Docker or VM instance does not mean easy to setup). Dendrite is not ready and has been "not ready" for years, n…

Similar story. A couple years ago I tried to set up Synapse. I've set up and administered IRC before. I've twice gone from nothing to having an XMPP server (different daemon each time) working and hooked into web services and custom auth serving production traffic. And that's just the chat-related work I've done. I kind of know what I'm doing, at least.

After a couple hours I gave up on Synapse, having accomplished nothing and only being more confused than when I started out, as far as any path to a deployed config I'd be comfortable with. That they sell hosting, and it was such an incredible pain in the ass to run sanely on one's own, sets off some alarm bells.

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#229

Post by tarkin2 »

sdm55 wrote: post #161
yakubin wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first IRC drama I'm hearing about. There is more drama in issue trackers of random GitHub projects that surface once a month on HN. I don't know where this perception of IRC comes from. Such a comment shows up under every link commenting on the matter. But it's still just one case.

This comment is September in a nutshell. IRC has fragmented itself into new networks because of olines bickering with each other since the early 1990s. Look into why EFnet, Undernet, and IRCnet (and sorta DALnet) came to pass. The history you’re confused about and that everyone else accepts as fact predates your birth, is the issue. All one has to do to see that it hasn’t changed is read these logs. Something about g…

There’s something about giving someone op. It’s like the electric shock power experiment: people generally end up abusing it. This, though, doesn’t seem as pronounced in online forums.

I have a lot of good memories from IRC but it did create twisted dramas full of power crazy ops who, as you say, take it all far too seriously. That seems to be the key.

Every mod seemed to be charge of their own school gang. Highly concerned with their own role and power rather facilitating communities and conversation.

Re: Leaving Freenode for a new network

#230

Post by moshmosh »

xvilka wrote: post #160
Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote: post #145

Not sure about people pushing matrix as an alternative. I tried out Matrix several weeks ago and hated everything about it. From the account creation process, shiny modern UI, channel finding options, activity level (since you are basically constantly logged in, channels with even quite a lot of users have next to no activity for days at a time), kind of activity (and most of it was really poor activity, like someone…

With Matrix there is also a lack of good lightweight clients and servers. The official client uses Electron. It will never be an alternative to the IRC with this attitude. There is a Weechat plugin but it's in Python...

There's a trend of "new, revolutionary Internet protocols" having reference (and, chronically, sole actually-useful, but with other ones always at various uselessly-incomplete stages of development so they can point to those and say "see, we're catching on!") implementations in languages that integrate like shit, crippling their adoption, rather than writing, say, a C library. IPFS is another one (and I like Go).
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