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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

#361

Post by coatmatter »

frankietwenty9 wrote: post #251
losteric wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What functional improvements are fundamentally incompatible with the "old" protocols? Longer lines could have been supported with a minor protocol revision. Giving customers the freedom to use clients that don't render images, or markup, is actually a positive. I setup Mattermost for my company. The deciding factor between Mattermost and IRC was effort to get non-technical users a nice GUI. Functionally, IRC would ha…

it feel a bit biased when you say that IRC could have a protocol bump, but you wouldn't make the same modifications to hide pictures in Mattermost. Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first. In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.

> Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first.

That's a feature for me. If I wanted to be constantly barraged with images, I would have stayed using Facebook and Twitter. People on IRC posting imgur links gives me the opportunity to accept or decline (usually based on their reputation, the channel's response, or my boredom). With other social networks, images are almost always unsolicited and often only waste scroll space (good luck to those still on limited data plans and want to know the context of the latest notification).

Besides, text often can have more substance and precise meaning (even if it's not perfect all the time). After all, we're all communicating with mostly just text right here. Another example of something else that features mostly text are books, so it's certainly not deprecated.

Give me all the text please - in fact, if you give me an image with a caption, I'll read the caption first. I can happily find images through other mediums so IRC without embedded images isn't a problem at all here.

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

#362

Post by coatmatter »

u801e wrote: post #345
rasengan wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It does require that one open a port in their firewall for it to actually work. xdcc bots usually would indicate which port one needed to open.

Having open ports directly to the internet (by default) with dial up modems (before routers and NAT) used to be such a common practice. Things have changed, haven't they?

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

#363

Post by terminalcommand »

u801e wrote: post #344
tonyg wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I believe that https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ documents how the IRC protocol is currently used (and I'm not sure why they chose that particular tld).

Ircdocs.horse is an excellent resource but it is unfortunately not complete.

Irc also has a lot of -to me at least- obscure specifications for example involving channel modes. The functionality differs from server to server.

I have the impression that most irc servers are operated by programs with old codebases coded in C. New client implementations are continuing to get written, but I do not see a lot of server implementations around, probably because it is complicated to write.

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

#364

Post by coatmatter »

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.

I think this is getting aside of the topic of what privacy really is for most people. IRC by default does not encourage endless selfies or oversharing that the modern social networks promote.

I've never seen an ircd cloak instruction page misrepresent what they can and cannot do. While protecting IP addresses is important (which the GDPR also believes in), I think it's also important to not lose perspective of the bigger dangers out there right now such as default user behaviour and conditioning. For example, IRC has never led to huge numbers of people publicly humiliating themselves by bitching about their employers, etc.

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

#365

Post by coatmatter »

Shorel wrote: post #267
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 remember the Ops, Sops, +v and all the medieval hierarchy that ensued. I remember channel takeovers. I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts. In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.

> In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.

This sounds vaguely familiar and I'm not talking about IRC.

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

#366

Post by coatmatter »

bengarrr wrote: post #136
cmsj wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is and always will be, the greatest social network :)

But its not really a social network...BBSs were/are great too! Plus BBs let you actually manage content versus just chat and link. IRC is great and always will be but a social network it is not...and I doubt we are gonna see any real revival.

What to you defines a social network?

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

#367

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

dmitriid wrote: post #356
puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange that you mention XMPP as you can have all that (including mobile - Conversations) plus end-to-end encryption (OTR, OMEMO, PGP - take your pick), message carbon copies and a server-side message archive that synchronizes all your clients. But hey, XMPP is passé so everyone prefers a vendor lock-in.

It's not strange. Because Conversations exists only on Android ( and the server you connect to has to support all the dozens of XEPs many of which are still in experimental stage). So, with Conversations I'm locked into a single client on a single platform. Yay, XMPP :-/ (There's no desktop client I'm aware of that supports Conversations' features). Oh, and I can have that only if I go through the trouble of setting…

You make it sound harder than it is.

Server-wise you want either ejabberd or prosody for the latest features. Yes, you need to set up a server once and read some docs, as with every self-hosted service. And if you don't care about encryption enough to read about it you can just enforce TLS for client-to-server and server-to-server connections. On the desktop, Gajim (win/linux/bsd/mac) supports all of the XEPs I mentioned. There are clients for iOS too but I don't know how they work as I don't own any Apple products.

Of course, if you'd rather spend money than time hoping that your provider won't have your conversations stolen, misused or disappear with them that's your prerogative too.

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

#368

Post by coatmatter »

Mirioron wrote: post #339
j45 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locality, interesting. I'd agree on BBS'. My experience of IRC, thought on efnet was expanding past my local calling area. IM definitely took the bite out of IRC because it was far better at creating beginners that never made it to IRC, and a lot of IRC users got pulled to IM. ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN created a new type of connection.

IRC always felt to me more like a public forum, whereas IM was private conversation.

The best private conversations start by branching away from a public space. It's that juxtaposition that makes each half all the more special (think noisy club/bar vs outside). I think the biggest failing of IM is that it's easy to end up with a declining circle of people whom you communicate with. Without a public space to replenish ideas from, privacy becomes a curse. IRC allows both.

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

#369

Post by dmitriid »

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #367
dmitriid wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not strange. Because Conversations exists only on Android ( and the server you connect to has to support all the dozens of XEPs many of which are still in experimental stage). So, with Conversations I'm locked into a single client on a single platform. Yay, XMPP :-/ (There's no desktop client I'm aware of that supports Conversations' features). Oh, and I can have that only if I go through the trouble of setting…

You make it sound harder than it is. Server-wise you want either ejabberd or prosody for the latest features. Yes, you need to set up a server once and read some docs, as with every self-hosted service. And if you don't care about encryption enough to read about it you can just enforce TLS for client-to-server and server-to-server connections. On the desktop, Gajim (win/linux/bsd/mac) supports all of the XEPs I menti…

> Server-wise you want either

> You need to set up

> clients for iOS too [nope, no clients beyond the very basic abandoned ones — dmitriid]

So.... Why would I want any of that? To feel "not-normal" "above average", as this entire thread seems to imply?

> stolen misused yada yada

Let's leave these scary strories to the kids, shall we? We're supposed to be all grown ups here.

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

#370

Post by mst »

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.

Speaking as a freenode staffer:

1) There are a number of ways to decloak somebody purely via irc/ircd fuckery - though it's liable to require several minutes of dedicated effort to do so.

2) There's a non-zero likelihood that if you try any of those ways we will spot you and k-line you.

3) That likelihood is not a guarantee, so when cloaking people we always make sure to warn them first that cloaks aren't 100% reliable and if users really want to protect their IP address they want a VPS, a VPN, or tor.

4) No, I'm not going to be any less vague about 1, just because it's not actually hard doesn't mean I want to encourage it.

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