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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

#321

Post by beefhash »

schoen wrote: post #105
Something1234 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link went dead. I would greatly appreciate actually being able to read this article.

You can find a working version at https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quake... The argument is that there's no way to move the whole IRC ecosystem to use TLS (including with enforcement of certificate checks on the client side) and so the security benefits will be radically degraded by patchwork adoption, because if even one channel participant accepts a MITM attack, all channel participants' commu…

> in the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel

Which does not map all cases. Queries are still far from dead. And you don't want to set up a small IRCd for shady things because that might tick off law enforcement a lot more than sticking to some established network whose security you trust.

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

#322

Post by cup-of-tea »

sirfz wrote: post #11

I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment apparently)

IRC is what introduced me to client-server architecture. Like many back then and still today I had this vague idea of "server" meaning some kind of powerful computer with no monitor. I used to love IRC but I was only in dialup Internet and wasn't allowed to use it very often. I sorely wanted to be able to idle on IRC at all times like some people did. But then I discovered I could actually install unrealircd on my own computer! I had my own little network with eggies talking to each other. I experimented with different clients and even connecting manually with telnet. It was great!

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

#323

Post by tonyg »

rasengan wrote: post #306
terminalcommand wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unfortunately RFC 1459 is just the shallow end. It both includes features that no-one uses anymore, and excludes widely-deployed features that everyone relies on. Lots of the de-facto IRC protocol isn't written down anywhere outside various client and server codebases.

The situation is not unlike that of terminal control sequences. The core VT10x functionality is more-or-less mostly in place, ish, in every terminal emulator, but some of the VT10x functionality is no longer implemented, and lots of subsequent useful functionality isn't well documented, so implementors are left to crib from other implementations.

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

#324

Post by antiterra »

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…

You might have missed it, but in 2015, someone replied to you to explain that IRC of the 90s wasn't 7-bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490691

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

#325

Post by lovemenot »

ddtaylor wrote: post #209
rasengan wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic. I want this society to work. And I refuse to let such a chilling effect of fear of failure stop our society from progressing. We all know that you learn best from mistakes. And we, as a society, have gotten much stronger and more resilient.

People have a dislike for Mark not because he took risks but because he didn't let other people solve the problems they clearly had, which is dangerous. The reason there are so many conspiracy theories about him is because he's made the line between stupid and malicious near impossible to differentiate.

>> People have a dislike for Mark not because he took risks but because he didn't let other people solve the problems they clearly had

I met Mark at the time of mtgox's (first?) public hack in 2012. Shortly after they'd moved to Cerulean Tower in Shibuya.

He seemed to realise what mtgox were up against, but they were ill-equipped to face it. Considering the immediate problems mtgox had then, he gave me more time than I probably deserved.

In hindsight, I believe Mark was hoping for a Hail Mary. Put another way, I believe that if I'd had the skill to get on top of those problems, he'd surely have hired me. Yet I just doubt that many of the necessary talents were around at that time.

It's easy to imagine that we would know how to do things right under exceptional circumstances. Mark was then the man in the ring, and he may become so again. Bonne chance.

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

#326

Post by rasengan »

leeeeech wrote: post #320
freeflight wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first. Maybe I'm missing the point here: But IRC does have a file transfer feature, so what would stop people from sharing images just the same way like plenty of "content" has been shared over IRC?

Have you ever tried it? 90% of the time I tried it didn't work, in mirc or irssi.

dcc sends and xdcc bots were pretty influential in the early internet. It definitely works.

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

#328

Post by [deleted] »

prawnsalad wrote: post #228
floatingatoll wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users. Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.

https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/292 Kiwi IRC actually implements this and has a ZNC module being released soon for it. Hopefully soon, other bouncers. These type of specs and actually getting them implemented in clients and servers is exactly the type of things the irc.com foundation will be supporting.

[deleted]

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

#329

Post by bogomipz »

rasengan wrote: post #318
bogomipz wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic" Sorry but taking calculated entrepreneurial risks is not at all the same as being careless. The contempt stems from the latter type of risk not the former. Conflating the two is also toxic.

By your theory every single exchange is simply careless then right? Every intelligent computer user knows that ALL THINGS get hacked. Practicing Defense in Depth is the only solution. All the exchanges hold your assets in trust, usually in just a few “cold storage” wallets. This is carelessness. They saw what happened to MtGox and are still operating like that.

>"By your theory every single exchange is simply careless then right? Every intelligent computer user knows that ALL THINGS get hacked."

I wasn't positing any theory.

The "carelessness" referenced also had nothing to do with being hacked.

Carelessness is misplacing 200,000 bitcoins. Carelessness is not even knowing that 200,000 coins are unaccounted for. Carelessness is hiring quiche and pastry chefs for your cafe instead of hiring security personnel for your exchange.[2]

"Shuttered bitcoin exchange MtGox has found almost 200,000 bitcoins which it believed were lost, according to the company's CEO Mark Karpeles.

The money was sitting in a wallet which the firm thought no longer held bitcoins. However, following the application for civil rehabilitation (a Japanese legal procedure analogous to bankruptcy), "these wallets were rescanned and their balance researched," says Karpeles, and one wallet was found to hold a balance of 199,999.99 bitcoins."[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/21/mtgox-mis...

[2] https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/05/02/bitcoin-cafe-...

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

#330

Post by kqr »

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…

Have you looked at Matrix.org? It's essentially the "modern IRC" people are asking for. I strongly suggest giving it a chance.
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