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I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff
- M2Ys4U 5y agoI'm shocked - shocked - that a shady VPN company would ruin a community resource like that.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoIs PIA shady? Or is it VPNs that are shady? Where's the shadiness here?
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoThey’re incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and no one can find out the names of the directors/owners/CEO/people in charge. That’s not shady to you, especially for a company that sells privacy?
- jaywalk 5y agoSo what you're saying is, the people in charge are really good at privacy? And this is a problem? /s
- ta988 5y agoYes because giving your privacy to someone requires trust if you want it to stay privacy.
- bigth 5y agoSounds like they know how to keep private.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoAnd that’s the problem. How do you know they are not a state actor?
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI don't care tbh. The threat I'm protecting against isn't the state reading my emails, it's Spotify (for example, but there are many, many more) refusing to sign me up because my IP is in a different country to my bank account. Or every single bloody website on the internet ignoring my browser's preferred language settings and serving me content in the language that they think my IP address comes from.
- jcims 5y agoThey sell privacy but it would have been obvious from the very beginning that they’re going to be a magnet for illegal activity. I would probably do the same thing if I were them.
- jussij 5y agoThey should have used the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" model like Google.
- mistrial9 5y agoyou compare aggressive teams with literally billions of dollars to an un-ending network activity that generates more costs than new nickels? have you ever been actually poor and yet working every day? stunningly insensitive, not funny
- varjag 5y agoAndrew Lee of Mt Gox fame is your guy. Also claims to be the crown prince of Korea.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoWhat if it is the NSA instead?
- varjag 5y agoHe's mentioned in the paste.
- humanlion87 5y agoNot OP. I am not sure about PIA. But I had recently done some research on VPNs since I was interested in getting one. From what I remember, most of the VPN services are owned by a few companies. And those companies don't seem to have a track record of good security or acting in the best interests of the customer (selling data, giving up logs, etc). My takeaway from that research was that I need to be real careful when trying to choose a VPN service provider and keep track of acquisitions.
- o-__-o 5y agoOr just get a dedicated server or vps somewhere and run OpenVPN or wire guard. There is no shortage of cheap vps providers so you could create deploy scripts and rotate your vpn endpoint regularly Disclaimer: I’ve been doing just that for 13 years now
- CarelessExpert 5y agoWhich is trivially traceable back to you and therefore defeats the purpose of providing anonymity. Much of the value of one of these VPN services is they effectively launder your traffic by mixing it with that of their other clients.
- o-__-o 5y agoYeah I guess it _is_ illegal to tumble bitcoins now
- fastball 5y agoFor anyone that wants a less shady VPN, I've found Mullvad[1] to be very good. They take privacy to the next level, where you can literally mail them an envelope full of cash with your anonymous login key and they'll top up the credit on the account. I also like Mullvad because they seem to spend approximately $0 on marketing (at least compared to the other guys) and don't do any of those bullshitty perpetual "limited-time offer" shenanigans. If you're American and want a VPN based in America (not the Virgin Islands etc), I've found TorGuard[2] to be very good as well. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/ https://mullvad.net/en/ [2] https://torguard.net/ https://torguard.net/
- Nextgrid 5y agoThe majority of the VPN industry is shady. It relies on spreading FUD and unfounded claims about security & privacy, and the economics don't make sense for a lot of them - they appear to spend more on marketing than the expected profits from such a service, so extra money must be made somehow, probably though unethical means.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoI travel a lot (well, not right now because pandemic), and live in countries that I don't have a bank account in, or speak the language of. This is a problem for a lot of web services. Apparently where your IP is located determines where you bank and what language you speak. Apparently people like me don't exist, or rather, are a small enough market to be completely ignored (which was the upshot of my conversation with Spotify support when I asked them to send me invoices in a language I understood, please, since they know I use the English client but send me bills in German). So to make my life easier, I use a VPN and pretend I'm in Australia/UK/Jersey/USA/Estonia/wherever makes most sense. I'm happy to pay for that. So far PIA have been great. They even have a good-looking Linux client that works with Wireguard. But if there's shadiness, then I'd like to be aware of it. I was genuinely asking where the shadiness is here.
- techrat 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 Not OMG SHADY! but definitely gives me cause for concern. As one comment said: "Trust and ethics are important."
- Nextgrid 5y agoI'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to use a VPN, but beyond circumventing geo-blocking and defending unencrypted protocols (which are very rare nowadays) against malicious local networks (public Wi-Fi, etc) there aren't many. The vast majority of VPN selling points are nothing but FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Security-wise, most (all?) websites you care about now use HTTPS which provides end-to-end encryption and are thus immune to malicious networks (public Wi-Fi isn't risky at all despite what some VPN ads say), and even if not, then the VPN isn't bulletproof either as it merely shifts the unencrypted traffic from your "local network -> server" to "VPN provider -> server" which might actually attrack more scrutiny from malicious actors as they've now got to only tap a single point and get lots of unencrypted traffic. Privacy-wise the biggest threats to your privacy are advertising companies and social networks, which will track you just as well if you're on a VPN based on cookies or browser fingerprinting (a VPN alone wouldn't protect you - I guess if you clear your cookies before switching to the VPN and never allow cookies to cross-over between VPN/non-VPN you might have a chance, but surprisingly this is never mentioned in any of their ads).
- rascul 5y agoPIA was aquired by a company that some consider to have a shady past. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
- marcus_holmes 5y agoThanks for the link :) Though that top comment seems to explain that situation fairly well? Reading the rest of the thread it looks like FUD and the usual HN mess, is there any actual evidence of shadiness since the merger?
- FDSGSG 5y agoDon't forget about rasengans cryptocurrency scheme that Freenode has been helping to promote.
- abstractbeliefs 5y agowhat freenode needs here is for users and projects to roundly reject andrew lee. If the userbase pulls together and stays the course, the network can survive, or at least remain whole enough to move to their new IRC network as soon as it's available. Best of luck.
- globular-toast 5y agoJust about every internet community I've been involved in has been taken offline or taken over by corporate interests and ruined in one way or another. I feel like some kind of vagrant as I move from place to place just trying to find people like me. So many friends have been lost over the years.
- 88 5y agoFor those like me who weren’t aware of the context, the third party referred to in the article appears to be Private Internet Access (PIA)
- rascul 5y agoIn 2019 PIA was aquired by a company that had been associated with malware. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682
- wrycoder 5y ago2017 Freenode blog by christel regarding PIA: https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 5y agoDamn. This doesn't seem good, at all!
- ryanlol 5y agoHilariously, many of these people were repeatedly saying that this would never ever happen. Not really a huge surprise after the network was sold to a VPN company
- throwaway525142 5y agoIt looks like this is just a draft so far. Most of the links are dead and one explains that it's also just a draft: https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt.
- kuroguro 5y agoYep, another link has draft in the filename and libera.chat doesn't seem to be operating yet. Looks like there's been a leak.
- swiley 5y agoApple killed IRC. If you still think what Apple does for software is good you're not paying attention.
- lvh 5y agoHow did Apple kill IRC or play into this announcement?
- thejosh 5y agoI think the times killed IRC. People wanted an easier way to communicate with a lower barrier to entry. Even tech communities with tech people are now all on slack etc, it's just the way the world works now :-(.
- brandmeyer 5y ago> Even tech communities with tech people are now all on slack etc True, but I'd rewind the clock back a little farther. Even in the early 00's, AIM was more popular than IRC.
- ghaff 5y agoThere are just a ton of messaging alternatives including SMS. I don't even really use Slack but I also don't think I've sent a message on IRC for years.
- diveanon 5y agoI don't think the rise of products like slack have anything to do with what people want vs what investors want.
- majewsky 5y agoNot in my experience. At my workplace, dev teams started setting up their own Slack workspaces by themselves, sometimes funded by private credit cards. After more than a year, the company gave in and purchased an enterprise subscription to get integration with our internal SSO and so forth.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fennecfoxen 5y agoI was acquaintances with Rob Levin before he perished in a bicycle accident. I think it’s safe to say that his presence has been missed, and this is just one more way in which it is missed.
- Kim_Bruning 5y agoI chatted with him a couple of times too. (had to dig up really old IRC logs to remember). Definitely a nice person!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- blondin 5y agohistory repeats itself. wish the entire staff godspeed with the new network.
- moepstar 5y agoThis is why we can't have nice things. IRC is a constant drama, all the way back to The Great Split[0] Been involved with IRC a good 25 years, running a pretty popular blog about it "back in the days", i just couldn't be bothered keeping it up and updated because of all the constant fighting, arguing, bickering and people outright attacking each other all the damn time. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but something about IRC gives people big egos, omnipotence fantasies which, again, leads to drama - i, myself, just concluded it wasn't worth my time anymore and moved on. Mind you, this comes from someone who met his (former) wife on IRC, made great friendships with people all over the world - something i'm still grateful for to this very day. But it wasn't made to last, sadly. [0] http://www.irc.org/history_docs/TheGreatSplit.html http://www.irc.org/history_docs/TheGreatSplit.html
- speeder 5y agoIrc is banned on Brazillian servers, most ISPs will insta-cancel your contract if they detect you are running a IRC server. Reason for that is that Irc drama attracts brazillian hackers and script kiddies like flies, having an irc server is like having a huge DDoS magnet, having a irc server is an excellent way to make a whole ISP crumble under attack. Last major irc network we had went bankrupt because of their DDoS protection costs rising and rising and rising until they went in debt to stay online and until they couldn't pay the debts.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoThat's really interesting. I wonder what's particular to Brazil that causes this?
- jphilip 5y agoWhy are all the gist.* urls returning 404, they seem accessible through the wayback machine though.
- prepend 5y agoI think they just screwed up the url and used the temporary url instead of a permanent one. Gist annoys me how they do versions and files in the gist.
- ExcavateGrandMa 5y agoFrom my experience...(I discovered many stuff by sharing ideas on IRC with ppl but this ain't the only attributions...) I distinguished IRC as nice place for "Anarchists, Lunatics and Terrorists". am far IRC and shitchat, by now life is easier... less distract-full :Ð
- davidcollantes 5y agoI can't seem to connect to irc.libera.chat. I keep getting "bad password" constantly, even though I am not sending one.
- tux3 5y agoYes, it doesn't seem to be open publicly yet. You need a server password.
- scarygliders 5y agoNow would be an excellent opportunity for those people to move to Matrix. IRC was good, and I still use it, but even I as a 51 years old greybeard unix/linux accolyte realise that IRC has had its day. If any of these chaps are reading this, move to Matrix - it'll be more resilient than IRC.
- welterde 5y agoI have given it a fair spin a while ago and I wasn't impressed at all (too many problems.. even with simple 2-person chat). Distributed database based chat isn't really the way to go to get something reliable (where nothing gets even close to IRC). Also there are new modern irc servers around (such as Oragono) that integrate lots of things that are often missed/bolted on externally, like history, bouncer, authentication, etc.
- joepie91_ 5y agoRealistically, IRC is far from reliable. Netsplits, messages out of order or getting lost, and so on - these are just the problems of having a distributed system of any kind, whether it's a federated network or just a couple of IRC servers. The difference is that IRC doesn't try to address these issues and just lets them happen, whereas Matrix does try and sometimes gets it wrong (more due to implementation bugs than protocol issues). I don't think it's fair to conclude that IRC is "more reliable" on that basis - if anything, I would say that Matrix comes out on top here despite the existing implementation issues. At least it eventually gets things into the right state.
- scarygliders 5y agoWholeheartedly agree with the above. Also remembering IRC's netsplits resulting in IRC Services being split off and resultant and inevitable chaos when the netsplits end.
- welterde 5y agoIt's not really as much of an issue these days as it used to be. And like I said.. you can get that all in a neatly integrated package where you don't have to worry about any of that anymore.
- aritmo 5y agoThat URL, https://p.haavard.me/407 https://p.haavard.me/407 is a pastebin text. According to https://p.haavard.me/ https://p.haavard.me/ the pastebins expire after 24 hours. But most URLs in the pastebin already are 404, which likely means that someone pasted an old text file for an issue that happened some time ago.
- Ajedi32 5y agoIt links to other pages like https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt which is still live (as of this comment) and was last updated yesterday according to the HTTP headers. Also https://gist.github.com/JonathanD82/72bf8f979bfd0a08c5ed25f96414e757 https://gist.github.com/JonathanD82/72bf8f979bfd0a08c5ed25f9... which was updated 3 days ago.
- OJFord 5y ago> It links to other pages like https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt which is still live (as of this comment) I'm guessing stuff behind '/privat/' isn't supposed to be, er, public.. oops.
- bennyp101 5y agoIs this from 2016? https://freenode.net/news/recent-events-and-future-changes https://freenode.net/news/recent-events-and-future-changes https://dis.tinychan.net/read/prog/1455902643 https://dis.tinychan.net/read/prog/1455902643
- gwd 5y agoOn the contrary; one of the linked drafts [1] links to the web archive of a now-removed blog post [2] dated 2021-04-18. [1] https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt https://fuchsnet.ch/privat/fn-resign-letter.txt [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode.net/news/freenode-reorg https://web.archive.org/web/20210423231439/https://freenode....
- bennyp101 5y agoResigned multiple times?
- techrat 5y agoAnd the service mentioned within the "I've resigned and lost all my admin access, but I've not resigned draft"... is a live site. https://libera.chat/ https://libera.chat/ https://twitter.com/liberachat https://twitter.com/liberachat Their twitter was created last month. Seems like there was an attempt at damage control more than anything else.
- bennyp101 5y agoStrange - maybe an attempt to publicise it again? The libra.chat only just being done - or someone else jumping on it, and hoping it would have some credibility?
- FDSGSG 5y agoContinuing this story from 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17696035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17696035
- adaml_623 5y agoThe, often corrupt, sell off of community assets feels like a constant in human society. From government kickbacks from oil companies down to community sporting clubs there is a tragic phenomena where if you have corrupt individuals in charge at a single point in time then there is a chance for an irreversible loss of a public good. Here's a link about a community club in Australia where one of the directors ended up owning the clubs assets after some bad decision [0]. [0] - https://www.michaelwest.com.au/a-barilaro-affair-how-the-barilaros-ended-up-with-the-clubhouse-when-the-club-went-under/ https://www.michaelwest.com.au/a-barilaro-affair-how-the-bar...
- guerrilla 5y agoSeems like something direct democracy or requiring referendums for such actions would solve...
- permo-w 5y agoit would help, but referenda are at the mercy of the media. if you have a nasty corporate-controlled media, which we very much do in the UK, then people will still happily vote away their community property. In the UK we had a referendum for more direct democracy. Something like 65% voted against, with a low turnout. Brilliant
- guerrilla 5y agoThat's a very good point. And how could that be rectified? Public service hasn't helped much nor more centralized state media. What do you do, require all news outlets be nonprofits?
- permo-w 5y agoI’d start by introducing the same rules for the print media as there are for the broadcast media in this country. I.e stories have to be fair and balanced. show both sides of the argument
- 5y ago
- julienpalard 5y ago<@kline> whats best is for everyone just to sit tight and wait for it to pan out, freenode isnt going to implode overnight no matter what random pastebins say <@Fuchs> as it is clearly stated in my letter, this was a draft that was not supposed to be published, but a draft from a colleague that linked to mine got indexed by a search engine and found <@Fuchs> as of right now, none of us resigned, freenode is still ran by the same volunteers that ran it for the past 2 decades, and the rest is rumours and hearsay, we'll gladly officially communicate when we can, until then I'd suggest taking any rants, pastebins, articles and the likes with a grain of salt
- jrochkind1 5y agoUh, WEIRD. Why would someone who wrote that email draft now say his own email was "rumours and hearsay"? That just makes the whole thing sound even sketchier. Also, geez, how can anyone who's an IT professional in 2021 think they can put something on the public internet without auth and keep it private? Really?
- arbitrage 5y agoPossibly threatened with legal action?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoThe think this seems likely. Threatened, or realized some immediate issue naming their replacement already. It seems like someone only jumped the gun on this information getting out, not that it wouldn’t come to be.
- bbarnett 5y agoIt is trivial to impersonate someone over IRC, if you control the infrastructure. Not saying it is so, but...
- throwawaylolx 5y agoWell, all the links at the bottom of the letter seem to 404, so it seems like they didn't mean to publish this yet.
- phoe-krk 5y agoFalse, see this snippet from #freenode: 15:04 <@Fuchs> as it is clearly stated in my letter, this was a draft that was not supposed to be published, but a draft from a colleague that linked to mine got indexed by a search engine and found 15:04 <@Fuchs> as of right now, none of us resigned, freenode is still ran by the same volunteers that ran it for the past 2 decades, and the rest is rumours and hearsay, we'll gladly officially communicate when we can, until then I'd suggest taking any rants, pastebins, articles and the likes with a grain of salt
- FDSGSG 5y agoFake logs, you can't have newlines in IRC messages!
- phoe-krk 5y agoInstall irssi! Newlines magically appear on their own, and it's really nice to not need to scroll left/right to read long messages.
- FDSGSG 5y agoShouldn't your terminal handle this even if you were using netcat to chat? If the client was injecting newlines that would end up being rather unpleasant when pasting chats into a different channel.
- phoe-krk 5y agoThat would prevent indenting the messages to the length of the nickname. Irssi performs manual linewrapping to achieve that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 5y ago
- johnvaluk 5y agoAll of the IRC channels I used to visit had very high signal to noise ratios, but I ultimately abandoned the platform for two reasons: 1) Penetration testers relentlessly scanned my IP address every time I connected. 2) Endless PMs pleaded for help recovering accounts with "forgotten" passwords on various servers. I never fell victim, but got tired of feeling like a target.
- FDSGSG 5y ago>1) Penetration testers relentlessly scanned my IP address every time I connected. You probably mean the very boring automated open proxy scan that every IRC network runs.
- Kim_Bruning 5y agoI just checked with the current freenode staff (as I'm sure a bunch of you have). I'm not sure what is going on; but the freenode staff are all in the usual place and most assuredly have not resigned. (edit: At least, they certainly haven't resigned as of yet.)
- satisfice 5y agoI went to the Freenode site and read the description and I still don’t know what Freenode is. Sometimes trying to understand the tech world is like zooming into the Mandelbrot set. But what I like about this feed is that I am constantly being exposed to new things.
- pteraspidomorph 5y agoIt's the FOSS IRC network, or if you don't know what that is, a network of chat servers where you can find official channels for many major FOSS projects, as well as a large community of people who want to discuss them in real time. At the time of writing >76k people are online.
- fouc 5y agofreenode is a popular network of IRC servers aimed at open source projects and technical topics. IRC is "internet relay chat", it's a very simple protocol, you can even telnet into an IRC server. Though there are lots of IRC clients that make it much nicer to handle multiple channels and direct messages and so on. IRC was super popular from the 90s up until Slack showed up.
- tomcooks 5y ago"wrong password" error when connecting to irc.libera.chat
- mikojan 5y agoFor the love of god, pipe this into fmt please
- jacquesm 5y agoWell, it did get written, and nobody writes messages like that unless there is a great deal of smoke and quite possibly a good sized fire. Time will tell.
- jokoon 5y agoBeyond the staff not resigning, I have to say it's weird to see discord flourishing when you have IRC. You cannot add favorite channels to discord, it's hard to browse, electron is clunky, and discord is centralizing all that data.
- EamonnMR 5y agoDiscord has easier user acquisition. Also anyone can set up a discord "server" and even the smallest fiefdom of power is like crack to people, so of course now there's a discord server for everything.
- 2ion 5y agoThat's true. irccloud exists but no discord equivalent for self-service virtual IRC hosts. And hosting an IRCd is not a simple task; even the most basic "services" like chanserv or nickserv are not simple to get running securely. Not even talking about client-side certificate authentication as supported by OFTC and suchlike.
- welterde 5y agoThere are irc daemons that have everything integrated such as oragono [1]. And if you just want an irc server for a couple friends you can just ignore ChanServ/NickServ.. it's not really needed (hell.. ircnet is still going strong and has no services at all!) [1] https://github.com/oragono/oragono https://github.com/oragono/oragono
- agumonkey 5y ago> fiefdom of power I keep saying that this is something discord pushes subconsciously and it makes a lot more places unliveable. On IRC chans feel more open and sociable than discord. On discord most servers come up with a lot more rules, a lot more steps (get a role) and people were often very tense. I had very sad and angry bouts on irc but it was rarer and about a topic disagreement / douche behaviour and not about bowing to a small group view on how to talk or laugh. It really gave a sect feeling. Then there are the slughtly5 political discord servers where you get a background check before the right to see rooms. Really odd (unless you're deep into anthropology)
- bilekas 5y ago> After some rushed-through recent changes, it appears that things are changing, and that the holding company, under external control, is now exerting some control over the network via legal means. What changes exactly? And whats the point in this message ?
- hutrdvnj 5y ago> You can connect to the new network at `irc.libera.chat`, ssl port 6697 (and the usual clearnet port). You might want to consider to shut down the clearnet port, since users will send their account passwords and all their communication inkl private messages in plaintext over the internet. I don't think that this is a good idea.
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoHow naive can you be that a company has acquired something you volunteer for and you don’t think you work for that company? What do people think volunteering is? Play time?
- janc_ 5y agoFrom what I understand, PIA never acquired the IRC network (which is running on servers owned by other companies, and operated by volunteers without any contract tying them to PIA), but only the name and some activities outside the IRC network.
- garaetjjte 5y agoWhy this submission suddenly disappeared from HN front page?
- ysangkok 5y agoProbably because it links to information that wasn't supposed to be public.
- topdancing 5y agoThis resignation appears to have gone unannounced: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10308021/officers https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
- dada78641 5y agoSo, I know that this letter was apparently a draft and wasn't meant to be published, and the people involved have not made any decisions yet—I'm assuming this just means they wanted to sync up their resignations and someone accidentally messed up, and it's not like the content of the letter itself is wrong or untrue. So with that in mind I'm curious if anyone here knows more details about these things that are being alluded to: > Sadly, some time ago, a holding company, Freenode Limited, was sold or transferred in some way to a third party by our previous head of staff Apparently the third party is called Private Internet Access (PIA), according to other posts. Who's the previous head of staff, and how did they have the authority to sell Freenode Ltd.? How long ago did it happen? Was this ever announced or discussed among other staff, and are the exact details of the deal even known by anyone else? Someone else also asked this, but, what are the "recent changes"? To what end is the third party company exerting control? It feels to me like someone was at some point put in charge of Freenode, and then decided they could make a buck off of it. If that's the case then the "hostile takeover" already happened long ago the moment that person decided to sell it. But there are so many unanswered questions here that I can't be sure of anything. It's a totally vague and confusing letter, and it alludes to all sorts of troubling things without ever clearly stating exactly what they are. Maybe in a little while all the drafts get published and we'll actually learn exactly what's going on. But then maybe there's something I'm missing, so if anyone knows please let me know.
- WCityMike 5y agoMirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210515030713/https://p.haavard.me/407 https://web.archive.org/web/20210515030713/https://p.haavard...