[HN Gopher] Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
___________________________________________________________________
Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
Author : highspeedmobile
Score : 114 points
Date : 2020-04-16 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (echelog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (echelog.com)
| jdsully wrote:
| I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really
| hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them
| showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs
| to be saved.
| gnramires wrote:
| that's why you use pseudonyms ;)
| kick wrote:
| Pseudonyms aren't a silver bullet.
| overcast wrote:
| I'd stay off the internet then.
| jdsully wrote:
| Simpler times my friend.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I run a mastodon server on the fediverse (distributed social
| networking over activitypub). Mastodon and Pleroma support
| deletes, but say you post something and someone boosts it and
| one of their followers sees it on a server your server blocks.
|
| You won't see their replies obviously (split thread) but if you
| delete the message, it gets deleted from your followers, but
| won't continue on to the server that your server blocks. So a
| copy will continue to exist.
|
| I just treat the fediverse as a big chatroom/reddit thread that
| can never be deleted.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| >I just treat the fediverse as a big chatroom/reddit thread
| that can never be deleted.
|
| Treat the whole internet that way. You can't forcefully
| delete things from other peoples computers/minds. The best
| you can do is request.
|
| I deal with this by posting almost nothing under my real name
| and switching usernames regularly.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Are you planning to delete this comment in a couple of days?
| guerrilla wrote:
| "not everything" differs from "nothing"
| wicket wrote:
| The difference here is that Freenode is not used so much for
| informal chat as with other IRC servers. Many free software
| projects use Freenode as the primary communication method for
| project coordination, and in this case it is essential to keep
| logs. Not everyone is online 100% of the time and logs enable
| everyone to catch up if they've been offline.
| dhodell wrote:
| Sure, but those projects can also trivially set up logging
| with their own bots and in their own clients, with better
| control of what is logged, when, why, and how those logs are
| shared. This service appears to have logged fewer than 100
| channels. This wasn't an aggregate logger and anyway
| aggregate logging probably isn't permissible anyway due to
| GDPR.
| wicket wrote:
| I don't dispute the triviality of setting up your own log
| bot; I was merely pointing out that Freenode is not solely
| used for informal chat.
|
| You bring up an interesting point about GPDR and aggregate
| logging. The same probably applies to mailing list
| archives.
| ciupicri wrote:
| Unfortunately Facebook and Google also log everything. At least
| Facebook lets you delete your copy, but Google does not allow
| even this.
| Geeflow wrote:
| I would have shared the same sentiment.
|
| I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active
| on IRC. Are loggers a more recent (as in this millenium)
| development?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You probably did without realizing it. A persistently logged
| in user (through e.g. a bouncer, or just someone not
| rebooting too often) is essentially a logger. Those logs are
| private by their nature, but where I IRCed it was common for
| channels to each have their own logging bot.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I would say chat history and asymmetrical scheduling for chat
| are expectations in this day and age, and the lack of them is
| one of the biggest reasons people find IRC irritating or
| difficult. (I ask a question, and if the person fit to answer
| it isn't logged in right now, it never gets even responded
| to.)
|
| Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack,
| etc. allows you to see messages while you were offline.
| Compared to things from the older eras of messaging like AIM
| and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone
| unless they were online as well.
|
| So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a
| relatively more modern element: They're filling in a gap IRC
| has with modern chat clients.
| [deleted]
| andarleen wrote:
| I am surprised that privacy aware companies are not using IRC
| more for their intra company chat, and that none invested in a
| webcam voice chat client for IRC. Even the most basic server can
| handle thousands of clients.
| hkt wrote:
| I recall working at companies where the ops or DevOps teams
| would run their own IRC servers pre-slack. It was basically the
| only way to get stuff done if you had a desktop PC and needed
| to work closely with anyone. The problem is that most companies
| don't know how to do due diligence on a tool like IRC and the
| clients aren't very friendly. The lack of commercialisation of
| the space is what prevented companies from paying for it, and
| that meant no easy and rich clients got built, which meant it
| never got commercialised, etc etc..
| hkt wrote:
| Honestly, it is sad but I grew up on IRC. Time to put all those
| ill advised remarks to bed..
| kgraves wrote:
| Can I use this on my iPhone? I haven't been able to find easy to
| use ones.
| uniquelygeneric wrote:
| I prefer Igloo IRC, but finding a server and chatroom is an
| exercise you'll have to do on your own depending on what you
| are looking for. I would start with Freenode if you don't know
| where to begin.
| mwest wrote:
| The screenshots for Igloo look nice, but the developer
| responses to reviews are... entertaining, and concerning.
| mattl wrote:
| I use IRCCloud, the app is decent.
| eloahx wrote:
| I have an irc server, no rules, nothing illegal though. we have
| fun! irc.t60group.org +6697 #kotu
| myu701 wrote:
| So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish
| deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in
| perspective of how big a deal this is?
|
| On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to
| 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?
|
| IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
| ori_b wrote:
| IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical
| help and discussion for most projects.
| hguant wrote:
| The various haskell IRC channels are some of the best places
| to learn and get help/mentoring with that language - so many
| patient, genuinely helpful people. It's one of those things
| that made me go "Oh, that's what everyone is moaning abut" re
| demise of the old web etc.
| echelon wrote:
| It absolutely still is.
|
| If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can
| make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow,
| or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have
| an answer in under five minutes and an interactive
| explanation.
|
| IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam,
| advertisement, and noise.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Not to mention that often the author and/or contributors of
| the technology in question may be available to answer
| advanced questions.
| rhizome wrote:
| First of all, you're not too young for IRC, it's still out
| there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! Depending on your
| interests your usage could resemble a live-action Reddit.
|
| Second, I don't think this is necessarily a big deal, though I
| could imagine that channel users liked the convenience of
| having their channel logged for them. There may even have been
| an ersatz Slack use-case there that people could easily get
| used to.
|
| However, channel logging has historically been the
| responsibility of channel users themselves, so there's a loss
| of convenience that could easily be taken up by a channel user
| setting up their own facility: a tiny AWS instance running a
| bot logging to S3, with a web interface and maybe a search
| engine. But that takes time and money and maintenance and
| interest.
|
| However, all of this functionality is out there on the web and
| internet, and has been used for a long time in various
| incarnations. I'm sure there are EFNet logs out there that go
| back well into the 90s.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels!
|
| s/channels/code So is COBOL.
| idclip wrote:
| If gmail had a dad who was more famous and more successful in a
| world no one remembered anymore.
|
| Think of the father in "there will be blood".
| dhodell wrote:
| I've used IRC for over 20 years and have never heard of this
| service. On your scale, it's "your second cousin's friend's
| sister's dog's goldfish had a VPS that went down."
|
| This is #2 on HN because people are reading "Freenode IRC ...
| is shutting down." That'd be closer to the gmail end of your
| spectrum. We are not shutting down freenode.
| Operyl wrote:
| Having used IRC, not that big of a deal in my opinion. Most
| channels run their own log archives, and you always have your
| own.
| ryanong wrote:
| IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server.
|
| There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well
| enough that was free.
| neilv wrote:
| Agreed. Freenode was (and should still be, IMHO) the go-to
| real-time chat for open source projects.
|
| I didn't realize how important at the time it was being
| founded. Rob Levin was an online acquaintance, and one day he
| started asking about how to fund an open source community
| service with donations. I was interested in open source and
| non-profits, so he and I talked a bit about that, but I
| didn't volunteer to help. Next thing I knew, he'd started
| Freenode, and projects flocked to it.
| barkingcat wrote:
| yah, but this particular service, which is a logging server
| run by an individual, isn't really all that significant in
| the grand scheme of things.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| If Freenode was shutting down it would be closer to "gmail is
| shutting down" IMHO.
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of
| the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over
| reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I think this would be useful: how many unique users have
| sent at least one message in the last 24 hours?
|
| I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest
| on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be
| hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's
| literally the same 10 people talking every day.
|
| There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just
| Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-related webdev Discord
| servers that that each have at least 100 unique users
| interacting daily.
|
| I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just
| echoes in the system, autoreconnecting from old hardware
| long after their owners have moved on.
|
| In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing
| great!" But frankly I don't think people realize how much
| IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has been eaten and
| it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging
| people who once used it in its prime.
| dhodell wrote:
| Many IRC communities have shrunk. Different reasons.
| Things like Discord and mumble, combined with more
| collaboration and multiplayer competition in games took
| gamers away from IRC and crippled networks like
| Gamesurge.
|
| Social media, especially things like Twitter and the
| various short video sharing services took away the
| "general chat" demographic -- partially because folks who
| were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel
| closer, and folks who are not tend to be younger, and the
| younger demographic trends towards newer technologies.
|
| Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as
| you point out this isn't always the case. I would argue
| that freenode is probably safe from too much decline for
| a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once
| used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit
| harsh :)) also tend to be people with a lot of experience
| in $technical_topic. If you want to ask questions about
| $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on
| IRC, that's where you go.
|
| You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is
| not on IRC. Javascript is a relatively new technology
| (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer, and Elm
| newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability
| to run native applications written in JS has caused that
| community to surge. It's also relatively easier to get
| into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So you
| attract more people, and you're going to attract younger
| people, and you're going to have a really diverse
| audience for a wide range of topics. All of a sudden a
| single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense
| anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem
| like fun, so you decide to use Discord or Slack. I think
| this makes a lot of sense for lots of communities.
|
| For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical
| communities, IRC is still a good solution. It's not fair
| to say that "its lunch has been eaten" -- it'll remain
| relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most
| accessible way to communicate. But there are other,
| different solutions for similar problems that do a better
| job of catering to specific audiences. And that's just
| fine.
|
| Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts
| from server stats, which are mostly aggregates. So I
| can't answer that question. But Freenode's a rather
| active network.
| [deleted]
| barkingcat wrote:
| unofficial irc logging services are kinda like the "I don't
| want to pay anyone, but I want to freeload off someone's
| netflix account" of the irc age.
|
| If the material was important to someone, they would already be
| connected with a bouncer or logger of some kind. For people who
| can't run bouncers, etc, this is a good service, but again - if
| you really thought it was vital to your work and/or personal
| life, you would have spent some money to either purchase an irc
| service (like irccloud, etc) or pay someone to run a proper
| logging service.
|
| The historical aspects are not nearly as dire in my opinion, -
| all someone has to do is to get a copy of the archive from this
| person (who doesn't seem opposed to this idea) - and host it
| somewhere. Again, the problem is costs - if someone deamed it
| important enough, they will mirror it.
|
| In this age, probably someone like the Internet Archive since
| no one will pay for the maintenance (legally, technically, and
| otherwise).
| uk_programmer wrote:
| IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before
| corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH
| Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing
| that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.
|
| IRC has a ton of advantages:
|
| 1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people
| on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with
| virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to
| my friends after school.
|
| 2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a
| server and you and your friends can start chatting.
|
| 3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse.
| It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant,
| there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in
| comparison
|
| 4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be
| building a bot in minutes in any programming language.
|
| https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/
|
| 5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the
| client itself.
|
| e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language
|
| 6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was
| used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than
| bit-torrent at the time.
|
| 7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to
| the server.
|
| 8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download
| the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your
| domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.
| barkingcat wrote:
| re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary,
| and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds
| are when you want to download it out of the service itself.
| uk_programmer wrote:
| Also can't script the client, you can't run your own
| server. Also with MIRC IIRC correctly you could layout the
| chat windows pretty much anyway you wanted and even have
| like a desktop background.
|
| Discord is a lot easier to use, but in a lot of ways it is
| really limited compared to the IRC clients.
| gknoy wrote:
| > the only thing that discord really does better is the
| embeds and voice.
|
| For me, the thing that Discord does really well is having a
| persistent message history, so I can join a server about a
| topic, see the pinned posts, read an FAQ channel, and learn a
| bunch without having to ask a question. That may be improved
| with IRC now, but at least when I was last using it (wow, 2
| decades ago?!) that was a real pain point.
| 1996 wrote:
| freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not
| closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing.
|
| The logs - depend on your stance. For what I do, no logs is
| better. Fewer logs may drive more people back. But here are
| many other loggers.
|
| FYI, IRC is still very handy to have and deploy in 2020. It is
| light enough for a small VPS to handle, easy to scale by
| federating if needed, and the lack of file support and of logs
| can be a feature to keep everything private for in house
| deployments.
|
| Just this morning I started to evaluate replacing some
| Javascript and Go code by some Fortran.
|
| I'm starting to believe in the army motto: "Yesterday
| technology, tomorrow!"
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| IRC is still hanging in there. You can get a taste by using the
| web UI, no registration required.
|
| 1) Go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ 2) Type something into
| the "Nick" box. 3) Solve the CAPTCHA 4) Hit Start.
|
| Freenode has thousands of channels, there's a bot called "alis"
| that can help you find something interesting. To do that:
|
| 5) type "/msg alis list python -min 50", which will open a chat
| with alis, which will then show the channels with "python" in
| the name that have at least 50 users. 6) type "/join #python"
| to join the channel
|
| Some channels require you to register before you can chat, for
| that, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration
| ken wrote:
| This is just one logging service, not any actual IRC servers.
| So today's news is not necessarily a huge deal.
|
| IRC as a system, though, is massively important. I'd say it's
| like the Twitter of the first half (so far) of the internet.
| When the (first) Gulf War began, the first reports were via
| IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is sad because BotBot.me shut down not that long ago too.
|
| We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment.
| https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/
| infogulch wrote:
| I wonder if archive.org would be interested...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Already pushed WARC files into the Archive for Wayback
| ingestion.
| ragest69 wrote:
| Oh
| rasengan wrote:
| I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community
| that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great
| channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams
| spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to
| OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet
| [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks
| [10].
|
| IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software
| applications across nearly every device that can be named which
| can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly,
| including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14],
| to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!
|
| IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github
| like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others.
|
| You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like
| KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23]
| or shamlessplug jbnc [24].
|
| [1] https://freenode.net
|
| [2] https://oftc.net
|
| [3] https://rizon.net
|
| [4] https://www.dal.net
|
| [5] https://tildeverse.org
|
| [6] https://snoonet.org/
|
| [7] https://quakenet.org/
|
| [8] https://efnet.org
|
| [9] https://ircnet.com
|
| [10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
|
| [11] https://weechat.org/
|
| [12] https://kiwiirc.com
|
| [13] https://codeux.com/textual
|
| [14] https://palaverapp.com/
|
| [15] https://mirc.com/
|
| [16] https://adiirc.com/
|
| [17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot
|
| [18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot
|
| [19] https://kiwiirc.com/
|
| [20] https://znc.in
|
| [21] https://irccloud.com/
|
| [22] https://quassel-irc.org/
|
| [23] https://www.bitlbee.org/
|
| [24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc
|
| Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If
| I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized,
| spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the
| amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!
| Avamander wrote:
| You've missed the best IRC bouncer-client there is - Quassel.
| eloahx wrote:
| jbnc :D
| anthk wrote:
| Add Bitlbee to the list and you can do magic.
| Avamander wrote:
| Bitlbee needs some work. I don't think there's a single
| plugin for it that actually works properly.
| ekianjo wrote:
| They do but break the functionality of the base install too
| airstrike wrote:
| If only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone
| out there is willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you
| coffee so I can switch over from irssi
|
| mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the
| good old days
| graton wrote:
| Seems like you can run it under Windows Subsystem for Linux.
| Geeflow wrote:
| My first programming projects were scripts and modules for
| eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :)
| Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years
| after the last release.
| hkt wrote:
| Mine were mIRC scripts for banning spammers. Eventually we
| had a community of people writing bots in perl, PHP, and
| loads of other languages. I was introduced to Unix by means
| of wanting to run irssi in screen so I could collect
| messages even when I was offkyine. It is no exaggeration to
| say IRC is completely responsible for my career, far more
| so than education!
| rasengan wrote:
| Another option is to try cygwin [1] as it has a weechat build
| [2]. Weechat also runs under WSL [3].
|
| [1] https://cygwin.com/
|
| [2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html
|
| [3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-
| win10
| efdee wrote:
| No IRCnet or EFnet mention?
|
| I don't want to be a part of this.
| rasengan wrote:
| Agreed and has been included now, I apologize for that!
| Please take part in this! IRC is community.
| toxik wrote:
| How can you not list QuakeNet?!
| _e wrote:
| irc.mtv.com isn't on the list
| kick wrote:
| What happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big
| plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but
| it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
| rasengan wrote:
| Keep an eye out! :)
| andarleen wrote:
| Is Rizon still the crime haven it was?
| amyjess wrote:
| From what I understand, most of the fansubbing community
| there has moved to Discord.
| admax88q wrote:
| www.dal.net not dal.net
| rasengan wrote:
| Fixed, thank you!
| buovjaga wrote:
| The awesome list: https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc
|
| Supybot's successor is Limnoria:
| https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria
|
| GitHub plugin: https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-
| plugins/tree/master/GitHu...
|
| Btw. on the topic of bouncers, Simon Ser is developing a new
| one in Go: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Can IRC be used through Tor and with end-to-end encryption?
| hkt wrote:
| It depends on the network. Freenode has a tor ingress:
| https://freenode.net/news/tor-online
|
| You can connect with SSL and optionally SASL (as well as
| cloaking your IP) but this is encrypted to the server. Most
| of IRC is public anyway though so E2E doesn't make total
| sense.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the
| perl/raku communities, but also other channels).
|
| Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly
| impossible to me, so I shut down some time ago. (It might have
| violated earlier privacy regulations as well, hard to tell).
|
| Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it
| goes to court, none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own
| lawyer seemed too expensive, and nobody who asked me to continue
| running it offered to pay for a lawyer either. Tough luck.
| kirstenbirgit wrote:
| what do you imagine would have happened if you kept it running?
| jtakkala wrote:
| A long time ago parsing Echelog logs was how I was able to
| monitor the IRC activity of an attacker at a company I used to
| work at. I didn't normally sit on these channels myself, but
| Echelog enabled me to look back and collect data on the various
| handles that this person operated under.
|
| There were 20-something handles they used over approximately a 6
| month period of monitoring. I was always able to find a small
| piece of information to correlate these handles together.
| Sometimes it started with a hunch, such as the language (even
| slang) they would use, but eventually they'd slip up in some way
| and we'd have a pretty irrefutable link to the person.
|
| This information helped us develop a motive behind the hack and
| the ongoing public info was then fed to national crime agencies.
| My employer never went through with prosecution, but as this
| person was of much interest behind other hacks they were
| eventually prosecuted and convicted. I always wondered if my
| occasional Echelog intelligence reports ever had a role in that
| conviction.
| unixhero wrote:
| For the record, careful with doing private investigations. It
| might look good on Netflix, but can turn sour real fast.
| cutemonster wrote:
| What can happen?
| gjs278 wrote:
| nothing. this guy is delusional.
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's probably a chance of you being retaliated against
| or going to jail yourself, depending on how you're doing
| the snooping.
| gruez wrote:
| publish your findings over tor, I guess
| jtakkala wrote:
| Indeed, and in that respect Echelog was a great source of
| OSINT material for the anecdote I described above. That,
| along with `whois` data and other public databases can
| reveal a lot without putting oneself at legal risk.
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