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IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

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Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#301

Post by s3krit »

hamandcheese wrote: post #222
jlgaddis wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "... IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy." Why is that? IRC supports SSL, of course, and many IRC networks offer "cloaks" (to hide your IP address from other users) and/or permit connections via Tor.

“Supports” is the real non starter. “Requires” is what we are looking for.

Most networks support a channel mode that only lets people connected to the server via SSL join the channel.

Some networks only let people connect via SSL.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#302

Post by rasengan »

Leszek wrote: post #280
klez wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The protocol itself doesn't bar you from implementing image sharing. Imagine this: You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on th…

Sounds like you're describing a new protocol.

I think the beauty of IRC and the previous way of thinking when we built the internet was just this - we could hack any change or additional layer into the software that we used.

IRC was, with the exception of simple clients, codable, scriptable, extensible.*

Software today is “what you get is all you get.” It’s pretty sad.

* It was a human body script that caused you to look at this “*”. Scripting is powerful.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#303

Post by rasengan »

hamandcheese wrote: post #220
na85 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that discord, slack, et al have a better privacy model?

Signal, keybase, iMessage all have a better privacy model.

Signal requires a phone number. Keybase is an identity service. iMessage requires a phone number and is not verifiable.

IRC on the other hand allows ephemeral usernames, you have the option to use e2e encryption if you choose, etc.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#304

Post by rasengan »

zingmars wrote: post #296
jlgaddis wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "... IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy." Why is that? IRC supports SSL, of course, and many IRC networks offer "cloaks" (to hide your IP address from other users) and/or permit connections via Tor.

Cloaks aren't reliable and there are a few tricks to uncloak a user anyway.

Tricks? Can you elaborate?

Like what outside of taking the scope outside of the IRC client (external link, etc)

An IRC cloak is programmed into the ircd itself ensuring that ones IP address is not exposed. I don’t think you can just hack that. If you use the external link trick, everyone is susceptible to that no matter what app/platform they use unless you use a VPN or Tor.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#305

Post by rasengan »

stickshift wrote: post #279
nopacience wrote: post #76

Long 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…

This was literally my first comment when I installed Slack for the first time: Isn't this essentially what IRC did for many years?

Exactly. Slack is like IRC without the features.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#306

Post by rasengan »

terminalcommand wrote: post #286
Leszek wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're describing a new protocol.

IRC protocol is actually really simple, you just have commands and parameters. AFAIK it is not unusual for IRC servers to implement extra functionalities through bots. For example to provide authentication many servers provide a bot called NickServ. There could also be a mechanism called ProfileServ that implements these functionalities. The beauty of IRC is that you can open telnet, connect to an IRC server and actu…

> standard specification

RFC 1459

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#307

Post by rasengan »

csomar wrote: post #269
tptacek wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s e…

I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and openness. I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.

Also, slack is like a dumbed down version of IRC. As an example, on IRC you could run an auction or a 10000 person university lecture because there is a +m channel mode (moderation).

+m quiets all users in the channel and only allows you to speak if you receive the channel-user mode +v (voice) or have +o (operator status). Some ircds also have a +h etc.

You can setup bots like “RaiseYourHand” for people who want to ask questions and need temporary voice (+v).

Try that on slack, telegram, signal, etc. Its impossible.

IRC was ACTUALLY built for collaboration and communication. Slack was built to make money.

The difference in goals causes a different outcome.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#308

Post by enqk »

tptacek wrote: post #174
nopacience wrote: post #76

Long 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 used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s e…

Do you know of a good archive/paper/article that summarizes the bad design characteristics of the early protocol designs? Is it safe to try to get familiar with new designs and compare with the old to extract the bad lessons learned?

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#309

Post by zingmars »

rasengan wrote: post #304
zingmars wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloaks aren't reliable and there are a few tricks to uncloak a user anyway.

Tricks? Can you elaborate? Like what outside of taking the scope outside of the IRC client (external link, etc) An IRC cloak is programmed into the ircd itself ensuring that ones IP address is not exposed. I don’t think you can just hack that. If you use the external link trick, everyone is susceptible to that no matter what app/platform they use unless you use a VPN or Tor.

That depends on the ircd, but on Freenode you could decloak using the services to ban the user from channel using IP ranges and see if they trigger (I think. It has been a few years since I this trick used, and it might've not even been bans). Extremely inefficient, but if you have a bouncer with auto rejoin on...

In any case there are some really obsessed people who probably know a hundred ways to take over your channels at the very least. Seeing some of these people do their thing is one of the reasons why I steer clear of IRC these days.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#310

Post by zingmars »

s3krit wrote: post #300
zingmars wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If IRC is decentralised, then so is Slack and all it's clones. Except they're not.

Cool, I look forward to connecting to your Slack server.

Self hosted and centralised are two separate concepts. IRC is very much a centralised service even if you can host your own servers. Matrix would be a better example of a decentralised protocol.
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