15 ms·

IRCv3

187 points by bemmu 11y ago

gtirloni 11y ago
Couldn't find support for offline messages in the new specs. Is it there somewhere?
- davorb 11y ago
  It's not there. I would say that this just tweaks IRC, rather than adds much needed features. A little bit of too little, too late.
  - supercoder 11y ago
    Too late ?
  - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
    I really wish IRC and other open protocols had a chance against Slack and the entire walled-garden ecosystem. Personally I'm highly willing to do some extra-setup in order to at least own the history of all my messages (not to mention the ridiculousness of separate Slack groups requiring separate logins) - of course this is a developers take, which excludes all the other employees.. Ultimately the Out-of-the-box some setup required has in as much doomed IRC as desktop Linux. The obvious problem being that the people that are interested in working on these things for free are nerds who are okay with the setup -- which just perpetuates a closed-cycle.
    - amandine 11y ago
      We are providing an option to bring together walled gardens with matrix.org: an open standard for federated distributed and persistent communications. It does give you the option to run your own server and bridge to other services like IRC (and Slack actually). We're also building Vector.im as a glossy client on top of Matrix to precisely address the fact that non techy users need something easy to use. So all this might answer your concern :)
- metabrew 11y ago
  There's a WIP spec for batched messages, which will be useful to group netsplit-related join/part messages, and for history playback: http://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html http://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html IRCCloud will be happy to support this as a client in due course. We also run our own custom IRCd for teams, which gives us a nice testing ground for implementing new bits of the server spec.
- nextos 11y ago
  I think IRC won't support offline messages as it somehow conflicts with the whole protocol. You can achieve this with your own setup via ZNC, but then you need a server running 24x7. IRC will hopefully stay as the preferred option for technical discussions, but we will need something else for personal communication (with increased privacy too). We have XMPP, which is complex, lacking and has too much client fragmentation. And emerging things such as Signal, Tox, Ring or Matrix. It's a challenge to implement offline messages and P2P. Even server federation is not easy if you want really nice crypto. E.g., see Signal.
  - RubyPinch 11y ago
    To give a usecase where tagging/requesting/etc offline messages is useful: using ZNC. instead one currently needs to shell into their ZNC box and start grepping through logs, not pleasant (there is a backlog module, however it required a bit of silly configuration and didn't support getting anything other than chat lines)
    - jeena 11y ago
      Perhaps I configured it wrongly but when I forget to close my IRC client at work then ZNC is not buffering and showing me anything on the other clients when I log in.
      - arm 11y ago
        Yep, you would have to change the settings a bit if you want that behaviour. Connect to your ZNC’s web frontend, and then go to: ZNC » webadmin » Edit User [the name of the user you’re editing] » Edit Network [the name of the network you’re editing] Then checkmark the following: • awaystore¹ (Adds auto-away with logging, useful when you use ZNC from different locations) • simple_away² (This module will automatically set you away on IRC while you are disconnected from the bouncer.) [You probably already have this checked] (This is assuming you’re on ZNC 1.6.1 like me). ―――――― ¹ — http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away ² — http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore
  - 11y ago
- lotyrin 11y ago
  Yep. Still waiting for the missing chunk of IRC:???::SMTP:IMAP.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
x5n1 11y ago
does irc support encryption?
- 1945 11y ago
  Yes, over SSL.
- SingAlong 11y ago
  IRC can be over SSL. A lot of servers have support for this.
- notalaser 11y ago
  The problem is stingier than it looks. On one hand, anything that can run on top of an encrypted connection "supports encryption". IRC is no exception, IRC servers have had SSL support for a long time now. However, the messages you send over the SSL connection will arrive in plaintext form at clients who chose not to use SSL when connecting to that server. Logs are also stored plaintext by many clients. There are servers which no longer allow non-SSL connections to cope with that. Edit: this debate is pretty long-winded, it was a pretty hot topic in a lot of circles even 10 years ago. I've heard proposals of adding encryption on top of IRC. The advantage being that even peers over unencrypted connections would still get encrypted data. I vaguely remember toying with some perl scripts for doing that over irssi. It's pretty pointless IMHO. People rely on IRC logs, and IRC in general has largely been for open forums and open collaboration. If someone needs to discuss sensible stuff over IRC, it's fair to assume that they don't want it discussed with anyone who happens to join their channel. In that case, it's perfectly acceptable to set up an SSL-only server with strong authentication (or even better, to ensure that you don't leak logs, to have everyone connect over SSH to a machine that runs a local-only IRC server).
  - davb 11y ago
    It's also worth noting that many clients now have LibOTR (Off The Record - end-to-end encryption) plugins available. For group chat, the best option seems to be a TLS only server and an agreement with all parties to avoid publishing logs on sensitive channels. Whatever technical measures or protocols are in place, you always rely on your correspondents' cooperation (no logging, no bots, only use secure terminals, etc).
adulau 11y ago
What's the current status of SILC[1][2] versus IRCv3? [1] https://github.com/silc https://github.com/silc [2] http://silcnet.org/info.html http://silcnet.org/info.html
- sdfjkl 11y ago
  Same as for the last decade or so: Complete, there are some clients/plugins, nobody uses it.
746F7475 11y ago
First time heard of irccloud today and I was interested since I've been running cheap-o VPS server mainly for irssi for past few years and this seemed like good alternative, but with quick testing this isn't a solid product. First problem I had is the same as every single cloud platform for stuff we have on desktop already (like cloud IDEs) why can't I customize things? Why can't I do simple stuff like hide my channel list/tree? I saw someone asked this feature via Twitter 2 years ago and Irccloud account replied "request accepted" or something and still nothing. Second more serious issue is chat history. It simply doesn't transfer from one device to next. If I have it open in one machine and open it on another the last instance will lose ALL latest chat history (in my testing at lest 30 minutes worth). This to me breaks the whole concept, you have no product. Whole point of this service is to provide easy access to the same IRC instance from anywhere, but if there is no chat history/log it doesn't provide that, it would be the same if I just joined with another client which I can do for free from multitude of different web based IRC clients. It's cool that you try to improve IRC, but first you really should probably get your product in working order.
- aristidb 11y ago
  Click "Load more backlog" and you will see the shared chat history. You can also download your chat history as a ZIP file, I think.
  - 746F7475 11y ago
    Loading more backlog doesn't seem to be doing anything, maybe if there is no new messages? But at least it doesn't populate missing messages in the between. And what is the point of having to download and extract logs from a zip file? That's not good UX. My friends and I are completely baffled that this MOST basic feature doesn't work as expect. Here is how it should work: I log in at home and I get full history of the channel (or as much as they keep, but at least last 24 hours), so I can see what's been going on. Then I leave for work (I leave my client open at home) and during commute I might popin and see what is going on, again I should get full history regardless what has happened while I was gone (or if nothing had happened). Then I get to work and again I should get full history of all messages and all these clients should get updated history whenever there are new messages.
blfr 11y ago
SASL is an authentication protocol, which improves the way e.g. NickServ login is performed, allowing connections to be established more quickly. What is the advantage of using SASL over logging in with a client SSL certificate?
- dozzie 11y ago
  User and password management? With client X.509 certificates it's difficult, e.g. issuing them is not fun. Moving them around is more troublesome than with a login+password pair, too. Also, try explaining client certificates to non-technical people, who probably are among the target audience of IRCv3 initiative.
- M2Ys4U 11y ago
  You can use TLS client certificates with SASL using the EXTERNAL mechanism.
- jcranmer 11y ago
  SASL is a protocol that allows you to mix several different schemes. You could (if the server supports it) use GSSAPI (e.g., authenticate using Kerberos or Active Directory, i.e., the backend for enterprises). You could instead use, say, EAP. Or you could use OAuth 2. Or you could use SSL certificates. Or you could forgo any of that and just use CRAM-MD5 or SCRAM-SHA-1 or SCRAM-SHA-256 for regular password authentication. Or, if you're really lazy, you could just use a plaintext user/password combination.
- Throwaway10323 11y ago
  https://gist.github.com/grawity/3813822 https://gist.github.com/grawity/3813822
arca_vorago 11y ago
Its nice to see irc isnt completely forgotten and there arenpeople dedicated to improving it. It's truly an underrated resource imho. Anybody else use screen and emacs erc on a vps for irc? One thing I dont like doing is connecting directly to irc. Also, don't forget about cloaking!
jwheare2 11y ago
Hi, I wrote the blog post and run IRCCloud. To clarify, the changes detailed here are to do with IRC as a low level protocol. While these enhancements do have user benefit, many of the user experience improvements we work on aren't necessarily at the protocol level. For instance, things like file sharing, persistent logging, synced mobile clients, push notifications etc can all be built as extra infrastructure on top of the protocol. In the same way that the Slack protocol doesn't give you file sharing without somewhere to host hose files, IRC as a protocol is less useful without services built around it. And that's the main benefit to using a service like IRCCloud. However, it's worth noting that an important aspect of the IRCv3 effort is around introducing new data types to the protocol. Things like message tags and metadata, that will enable client developers to offer new features that would be hard or impossible to implement without breaking a lot of the existing ecosystem around IRC. And it's the existing open communities on IRC that represent a major advantage over closed proprietary chat systems. Some examples of things that could be achieved with these new data types and mechanisms: * If you wanted to add avatars, there isn't a standard place to put it that all clients will know how to access. A metadata key enables that. * A bot that supports some form of rich payload, e.g. a quoted snippet from a linked website, with a favicon and preview image. You could provide this with message tags. There are also interesting opportunities with the -notify capabilities. Being able to receive status updates (e.g. if someone goes away or identifies) lets clients present useful presence indicators for people you're chatting with. I can imagine these being combined in interesting ways. For example, label a message with an id tag and then receive fave-notify messages for it, to allow a "starring" feature. For IRC to be a competitor to modern chat alternatives it needs a combination of these improved protocol features as well as a support infrastructure.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Aren't avatars already supported with the CTCP AVATAR command?
  - jwheare2 11y ago
    Beyond things like ACTION, CTCP is not widely or consistently supported. This is partly because no one is advancing the specification, and partly because it isn't well specified in the first place. Not to mention the syntactic issues with hacking the payload into IRC's 512 byte limit using invisible meta characters. Metadata and message tags (which support an extra 512 bytes of data) are much more suited to this sort of feature, are better specified, and have more backing from client developers.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Will these changes eventually make it into a new RFC? IRC is an IETF standard.
- jwheare2 11y ago
  There is an effort[1] to unify these changes alongside a revised IRC spec that reflects real world implementations and improves upon the existing RFCs, but it's a longer term plan and still a work in progress. [1] https://github.com/kaniini/ircv3-harmony https://github.com/kaniini/ircv3-harmony
- thristian 11y ago
  IRC is kind of an IETF standard. That is, there are RFCs for the IRC protocol that are a useful introduction, but they don't cover basic user-visible things like `/me` or formatting codes (colour/bold/etc), and even the non-IETF specs that cover those things aren't necessarily reliable (the CTCP spec has a whole thing about how to encode metacharacters in payloads that in practice everybody ignores). At least these IRCv3 guys are writing down what they're doing.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    There are unofficial extensions, yeah, but that doesn't make IRC not be standard. I think it just needs to happen that someone gets the various extensions finally standardised.
jd3 11y ago
I'm so confused as to whether Mozilla Thunderbird utilizes ChatZilla itself as the irc backend or if the developers simply re-wrote irc support from the ground up... ChatZilla is by far my favorite client and I would love if it could support new IRCv3 features.
dfc 11y ago
Is this an open standard /follow up to RFC2812/2813 or is it a company trying to coopt an open standard and sell a closed service?
- jwheare2 11y ago
  IRCv3 is a working group consisting of many different IRC developers and operators http://ircv3.net/participation.html http://ircv3.net/participation.html that produces specifications by consensus, and there is a longer term effort to propose a unified RFC that improves upon 2812/1459. IRCCloud as a company is an active member of the working group. I'm not sure how we would be co-opting any standard, but we implement them, and yes, we do sell a service. It's closed in the sense that we provide a proprietary API on top of IRC and you need to sign up to our service to enjoy any benefit from it. But it's open in the sense that you can connect to any open IRC server, and if you choose to no longer use our service, you can download your logs, pick up any other client and continue to use IRC without having to recreate your community from scratch. How suspicious you should be of all the above is entirely up to you.

IRCv3

187 points by bemmu 11y ago

gtirloni 11y ago

Couldn't find support for offline messages in the new specs. Is it there somewhere?

davorb 11y ago
It's not there. I would say that this just tweaks IRC, rather than adds much needed features. A little bit of too little, too late.
- supercoder 11y ago
  Too late ?
- forgotpwtomain 11y ago
  I really wish IRC and other open protocols had a chance against Slack and the entire walled-garden ecosystem. Personally I'm highly willing to do some extra-setup in order to at least own the history of all my messages (not to mention the ridiculousness of separate Slack groups requiring separate logins) - of course this is a developers take, which excludes all the other employees.. Ultimately the Out-of-the-box some setup required has in as much doomed IRC as desktop Linux. The obvious problem being that the people that are interested in working on these things for free are nerds who are okay with the setup -- which just perpetuates a closed-cycle.
  - amandine 11y ago
    We are providing an option to bring together walled gardens with matrix.org: an open standard for federated distributed and persistent communications. It does give you the option to run your own server and bridge to other services like IRC (and Slack actually). We're also building Vector.im as a glossy client on top of Matrix to precisely address the fact that non techy users need something easy to use. So all this might answer your concern :)
metabrew 11y ago
There's a WIP spec for batched messages, which will be useful to group netsplit-related join/part messages, and for history playback: http://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html http://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html IRCCloud will be happy to support this as a client in due course. We also run our own custom IRCd for teams, which gives us a nice testing ground for implementing new bits of the server spec.
nextos 11y ago
I think IRC won't support offline messages as it somehow conflicts with the whole protocol. You can achieve this with your own setup via ZNC, but then you need a server running 24x7. IRC will hopefully stay as the preferred option for technical discussions, but we will need something else for personal communication (with increased privacy too). We have XMPP, which is complex, lacking and has too much client fragmentation. And emerging things such as Signal, Tox, Ring or Matrix. It's a challenge to implement offline messages and P2P. Even server federation is not easy if you want really nice crypto. E.g., see Signal.
- RubyPinch 11y ago
  To give a usecase where tagging/requesting/etc offline messages is useful: using ZNC. instead one currently needs to shell into their ZNC box and start grepping through logs, not pleasant (there is a backlog module, however it required a bit of silly configuration and didn't support getting anything other than chat lines)
  - jeena 11y ago
    Perhaps I configured it wrongly but when I forget to close my IRC client at work then ZNC is not buffering and showing me anything on the other clients when I log in.
    - arm 11y ago
      Yep, you would have to change the settings a bit if you want that behaviour. Connect to your ZNC’s web frontend, and then go to: ZNC » webadmin » Edit User [the name of the user you’re editing] » Edit Network [the name of the network you’re editing] Then checkmark the following: • awaystore¹ (Adds auto-away with logging, useful when you use ZNC from different locations) • simple_away² (This module will automatically set you away on IRC while you are disconnected from the bouncer.) [You probably already have this checked] (This is assuming you’re on ZNC 1.6.1 like me). ―――――― ¹ — http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away http://wiki.znc.in/Simple_away ² — http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore http://wiki.znc.in/Awaystore
- 11y ago
lotyrin 11y ago
Yep. Still waiting for the missing chunk of IRC:???::SMTP:IMAP.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

x5n1 11y ago

does irc support encryption?

1945 11y ago
Yes, over SSL.
SingAlong 11y ago
IRC can be over SSL. A lot of servers have support for this.
notalaser 11y ago
The problem is stingier than it looks. On one hand, anything that can run on top of an encrypted connection "supports encryption". IRC is no exception, IRC servers have had SSL support for a long time now. However, the messages you send over the SSL connection will arrive in plaintext form at clients who chose not to use SSL when connecting to that server. Logs are also stored plaintext by many clients. There are servers which no longer allow non-SSL connections to cope with that. Edit: this debate is pretty long-winded, it was a pretty hot topic in a lot of circles even 10 years ago. I've heard proposals of adding encryption on top of IRC. The advantage being that even peers over unencrypted connections would still get encrypted data. I vaguely remember toying with some perl scripts for doing that over irssi. It's pretty pointless IMHO. People rely on IRC logs, and IRC in general has largely been for open forums and open collaboration. If someone needs to discuss sensible stuff over IRC, it's fair to assume that they don't want it discussed with anyone who happens to join their channel. In that case, it's perfectly acceptable to set up an SSL-only server with strong authentication (or even better, to ensure that you don't leak logs, to have everyone connect over SSH to a machine that runs a local-only IRC server).
- davb 11y ago
  It's also worth noting that many clients now have LibOTR (Off The Record - end-to-end encryption) plugins available. For group chat, the best option seems to be a TLS only server and an agreement with all parties to avoid publishing logs on sensitive channels. Whatever technical measures or protocols are in place, you always rely on your correspondents' cooperation (no logging, no bots, only use secure terminals, etc).

adulau 11y ago

What's the current status of SILC[1][2] versus IRCv3? [1] https://github.com/silc https://github.com/silc [2] http://silcnet.org/info.html http://silcnet.org/info.html

sdfjkl 11y ago
Same as for the last decade or so: Complete, there are some clients/plugins, nobody uses it.

746F7475 11y ago

First time heard of irccloud today and I was interested since I've been running cheap-o VPS server mainly for irssi for past few years and this seemed like good alternative, but with quick testing this isn't a solid product. First problem I had is the same as every single cloud platform for stuff we have on desktop already (like cloud IDEs) why can't I customize things? Why can't I do simple stuff like hide my channel list/tree? I saw someone asked this feature via Twitter 2 years ago and Irccloud account replied "request accepted" or something and still nothing. Second more serious issue is chat history. It simply doesn't transfer from one device to next. If I have it open in one machine and open it on another the last instance will lose ALL latest chat history (in my testing at lest 30 minutes worth). This to me breaks the whole concept, you have no product. Whole point of this service is to provide easy access to the same IRC instance from anywhere, but if there is no chat history/log it doesn't provide that, it would be the same if I just joined with another client which I can do for free from multitude of different web based IRC clients. It's cool that you try to improve IRC, but first you really should probably get your product in working order.

aristidb 11y ago
Click "Load more backlog" and you will see the shared chat history. You can also download your chat history as a ZIP file, I think.
- 746F7475 11y ago
  Loading more backlog doesn't seem to be doing anything, maybe if there is no new messages? But at least it doesn't populate missing messages in the between. And what is the point of having to download and extract logs from a zip file? That's not good UX. My friends and I are completely baffled that this MOST basic feature doesn't work as expect. Here is how it should work: I log in at home and I get full history of the channel (or as much as they keep, but at least last 24 hours), so I can see what's been going on. Then I leave for work (I leave my client open at home) and during commute I might popin and see what is going on, again I should get full history regardless what has happened while I was gone (or if nothing had happened). Then I get to work and again I should get full history of all messages and all these clients should get updated history whenever there are new messages.

blfr 11y ago

SASL is an authentication protocol, which improves the way e.g. NickServ login is performed, allowing connections to be established more quickly. What is the advantage of using SASL over logging in with a client SSL certificate?

dozzie 11y ago
User and password management? With client X.509 certificates it's difficult, e.g. issuing them is not fun. Moving them around is more troublesome than with a login+password pair, too. Also, try explaining client certificates to non-technical people, who probably are among the target audience of IRCv3 initiative.
M2Ys4U 11y ago
You can use TLS client certificates with SASL using the EXTERNAL mechanism.
jcranmer 11y ago
SASL is a protocol that allows you to mix several different schemes. You could (if the server supports it) use GSSAPI (e.g., authenticate using Kerberos or Active Directory, i.e., the backend for enterprises). You could instead use, say, EAP. Or you could use OAuth 2. Or you could use SSL certificates. Or you could forgo any of that and just use CRAM-MD5 or SCRAM-SHA-1 or SCRAM-SHA-256 for regular password authentication. Or, if you're really lazy, you could just use a plaintext user/password combination.
Throwaway10323 11y ago
https://gist.github.com/grawity/3813822 https://gist.github.com/grawity/3813822

arca_vorago 11y ago

Its nice to see irc isnt completely forgotten and there arenpeople dedicated to improving it. It's truly an underrated resource imho. Anybody else use screen and emacs erc on a vps for irc? One thing I dont like doing is connecting directly to irc. Also, don't forget about cloaking!

jwheare2 11y ago

Hi, I wrote the blog post and run IRCCloud. To clarify, the changes detailed here are to do with IRC as a low level protocol. While these enhancements do have user benefit, many of the user experience improvements we work on aren't necessarily at the protocol level. For instance, things like file sharing, persistent logging, synced mobile clients, push notifications etc can all be built as extra infrastructure on top of the protocol. In the same way that the Slack protocol doesn't give you file sharing without somewhere to host hose files, IRC as a protocol is less useful without services built around it. And that's the main benefit to using a service like IRCCloud. However, it's worth noting that an important aspect of the IRCv3 effort is around introducing new data types to the protocol. Things like message tags and metadata, that will enable client developers to offer new features that would be hard or impossible to implement without breaking a lot of the existing ecosystem around IRC. And it's the existing open communities on IRC that represent a major advantage over closed proprietary chat systems. Some examples of things that could be achieved with these new data types and mechanisms: * If you wanted to add avatars, there isn't a standard place to put it that all clients will know how to access. A metadata key enables that. * A bot that supports some form of rich payload, e.g. a quoted snippet from a linked website, with a favicon and preview image. You could provide this with message tags. There are also interesting opportunities with the -notify capabilities. Being able to receive status updates (e.g. if someone goes away or identifies) lets clients present useful presence indicators for people you're chatting with. I can imagine these being combined in interesting ways. For example, label a message with an id tag and then receive fave-notify messages for it, to allow a "starring" feature. For IRC to be a competitor to modern chat alternatives it needs a combination of these improved protocol features as well as a support infrastructure.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Aren't avatars already supported with the CTCP AVATAR command?
- jwheare2 11y ago
  Beyond things like ACTION, CTCP is not widely or consistently supported. This is partly because no one is advancing the specification, and partly because it isn't well specified in the first place. Not to mention the syntactic issues with hacking the payload into IRC's 512 byte limit using invisible meta characters. Metadata and message tags (which support an extra 512 bytes of data) are much more suited to this sort of feature, are better specified, and have more backing from client developers.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Will these changes eventually make it into a new RFC? IRC is an IETF standard.

jwheare2 11y ago
There is an effort[1] to unify these changes alongside a revised IRC spec that reflects real world implementations and improves upon the existing RFCs, but it's a longer term plan and still a work in progress. [1] https://github.com/kaniini/ircv3-harmony https://github.com/kaniini/ircv3-harmony
thristian 11y ago
IRC is kind of an IETF standard. That is, there are RFCs for the IRC protocol that are a useful introduction, but they don't cover basic user-visible things like `/me` or formatting codes (colour/bold/etc), and even the non-IETF specs that cover those things aren't necessarily reliable (the CTCP spec has a whole thing about how to encode metacharacters in payloads that in practice everybody ignores). At least these IRCv3 guys are writing down what they're doing.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  There are unofficial extensions, yeah, but that doesn't make IRC not be standard. I think it just needs to happen that someone gets the various extensions finally standardised.

jd3 11y ago

I'm so confused as to whether Mozilla Thunderbird utilizes ChatZilla itself as the irc backend or if the developers simply re-wrote irc support from the ground up... ChatZilla is by far my favorite client and I would love if it could support new IRCv3 features.

dfc 11y ago

Is this an open standard /follow up to RFC2812/2813 or is it a company trying to coopt an open standard and sell a closed service?

jwheare2 11y ago
IRCv3 is a working group consisting of many different IRC developers and operators http://ircv3.net/participation.html http://ircv3.net/participation.html that produces specifications by consensus, and there is a longer term effort to propose a unified RFC that improves upon 2812/1459. IRCCloud as a company is an active member of the working group. I'm not sure how we would be co-opting any standard, but we implement them, and yes, we do sell a service. It's closed in the sense that we provide a proprietary API on top of IRC and you need to sign up to our service to enjoy any benefit from it. But it's open in the sense that you can connect to any open IRC server, and if you choose to no longer use our service, you can download your logs, pick up any other client and continue to use IRC without having to recreate your community from scratch. How suspicious you should be of all the above is entirely up to you.