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Freenode IRC operators now engaging in routine abuses of power
- mith__ 5y agoIt is impressive how little time it took for the abuses to kick in.
- tmccrary55 5y agoIt's a shame abusive operators have taken over Freenode... /s
- hirundo 5y agorasengan, this is coherent, credible and serious enough to deserve a response from you, and this is an excellent place for it. I don't wish to draw conclusions from this without hearing your side. I hope you have time for that.
- judge2020 5y agoFor reference, he has a HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rasengan https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rasengan
- detaro 5y agoand he even had submitted the mentioned channel last week :D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145315
- shocks 5y agoThis comment feels doxxy.
- chownie 5y agoOnly if you reach as far as you possibly can to stretch that word. Putting "=Username" at the end to see if the user has an account on the very site we're discussing this on is pretty far from documenting identifying information, no?
- sva_ 5y agoAdditionally, he's personally posted a statement about it here through that account[0] a day ago. It's definitely not doxxing if he already revealed his identity himself. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27234542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27234542
- breakfastduck 5y agochecking if someone has got an account on HN is doxxing now?
- mfer 5y agodoxxing, by definition, is revealing previously private information. On his hacker news profile he’s listed his email that links that account to him. It’s all public.
- thih9 5y agoI don’t like seeing direct links to profiles in threads like this; I always worry that the comment section will turn into a stalking mob.
- kgwxd 5y agoI bet he goes radio silent on this one. This is one of the worst sins that can be committed against an IRC channel by an admin, and no amount of BS is going to convince anyone he didn't cross the line by a million miles. Not sure how anyone is giving this guy the benefit of the doubt at this point.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoCan we count https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27247959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27247959 as a response?
- pavel_lishin 5y ago> I suggest adopting a simple protocol of never using Freenode PMs for any conversation at all. This protocol is both easy and convenient; if you want to talk to someone, you can simply PM them on another IRC network, since most people are connected to more than one network. If you don't know whether they're on another network, simply ask. I'm a little surprised someone hasn't written some sort of plugin for common IRC clients to support at least minimal encryption in PMs.
- johnmaguire 5y agoIt's called OTR. Some clients support it, but in my experience they are not all compatible. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging
- emilfihlman 5y agoOTR is just one aspect of encrypted communications between parties.
- hannob 5y agoI think OTR kinda works on IRC, but isn't widely used. Ultimately I think the conclusion is that adding an encryption layer onto something that by design is simple and unencrypted rarely leads to any good outcome.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- serf 5y agoI mean... I wouldn't support the decision to do so, nor should others, but DCC Chat can be used to skip the relay without encryption being needed. that said.. someone using dcc chat probably should consider encryption (if they use dcc at all) given that it could be sniffed elsewhere.
- BlackLotus89 5y ago
- moocowtruck 5y agowhat is this 1997 irc drama?
- pluc 5y agoThe whole thing is.
- cookguyruffles 5y agohonestly don't mind this one, worth it for the fairly awesome meta footnote
- superkuh 5y ago1997 IRC drama was resolved on IRC. This drama is mostly being executed through lawyers and legal BS.
- ajross 5y agoI'm always amazed at the amount of drama in communities like this, given that the absolute value of these channels tends to be so low. I mean, we're not talking about someone hijacking an ad-rich youtube channel here. This is the "##hntop" channel. It reposts top news from... this very site. It's something anyone reading this comment can get for free by pressing the back button on their browser. And yet someone still decides it's worth their effort to kick an admin (or I guess in this case force the channel registration) and steal it? Good grief.
- JackGreyhat 5y agoPretty much makes it even worse.
- mmastrac 5y agoOften lowest stakes and highest drama go hand-in-hand.
- sidpatil 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
- simias 5y agoI feel the same way, but I think it's really simple: people who care enough about being mods to become one are the same people who are likely to let it get to their head. Mod drama on reddit for instance is fairly incredible in scope and dedication. For some people being a mod seems to be effectively a full time activity and getting to mod as many subreddits as possible an objective, regardless of whether you have any particular interest in the sub in question. It's absolutely baffling to me because you'd have to pay me to do that job, but clearly some people thrive on this type of power.
- dimmke 5y agoI had the same thought I think it’s super funny I’m reading about IRC drama on here in 2021
- 5y ago
- anonops_2021 5y agoThis was expected. After taking over Snoonet, it went to shit. According to anonymous sources they even installed extensive logging on the ircd-servers which made them be able to read alot of PRIVMSG´s. I sure wouldnt want to discuss anything important/ secret or anything with *coin on freenode as of now. ALso, whats up with all the new servers linked? Weird
- prawnsalad 5y agoPlease don't spread false info. Andrew has never had access to the Snoonet data or servers and there has never been any logging. Anonymous "sources" for IRC drama are usually anonymous for a reason, just as your new HN account is. Source: I help run and maintain the servers.
- jesopo 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210514172245/https://sand.cat/fiW5QDYXauoKwybL/snoo-takeover.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20210514172245/https://sand.cat/... > [00:59:01] <prawnsalad> also re. user data, youre forgetting that all data under snoonet is ltm data. rdv had sold all of that way beforehand. neither i, or most of you had any say in that
- prawnsalad 5y agoOwning and actually having access to are two entirely different things. At no point has Andrew had access to, read or write, or log, in any way shape or form, any private Snoonet data. User data was specifically locked down to (if I remember off-hand) roughly 3 staff members who were all from the community staff. This has continued so far and has no plans for it to change.
- kuschku 5y agoThat would be trustworthy, if Andrew hadn't talked about not having and never desiring +O on freenode 4 years ago. [1] If he's willing to go back on those terms and agreements, why not on this one as well? ________________________ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27247619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27247619
- psim1 5y agoThe freenode drama reads like tabloid trash gossip and I question the value of it on a sophisticated site like HN.
- plorntus 5y agoEh I feel as though you relinquished the channel the second you essentially shut it down. Why would freenode or any IRC server want to just keep a channel that is unused except to advertise a different server? I would understand more if it was some sort of specific channel that the name was clearly exclusively yours but its rather generic and a bot that many people here could also maintain. Strikes me as sort of 'domain squatting'
- na85 5y agoYou have a valid point but in the IRC netiquette there's a strong (very strong) taboo against server/network operators abusing their permissions to interfere with channels, particuarly taking over a channel that is registered.
- joepie91_ 5y agoThis is indicative of the broader problem: whereas the former staff treated Freenode as a community resource of which they were stewards (hence also the policy around abandoned channels), the new administration is clearly treating it as their personal sandbox to play in.
- plorntus 5y agoCant edit this post on this HN client but just to note, personally I dont have much knowledge of freenode specifically so I dont know if this is exclusively a bad thing because its freenode and not slme other server.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hlandau 5y agoFreenode broke their own policies to do this: https://freenode.net/policies https://freenode.net/policies >Primary channels do not expire with inactivity, though they can be claimed at any time by a representative of an on-topic project with the appropriate name. Topical channels expire after 60 days in which no user on the access list for the channel has joined it. ##hntop is a topical channel, since it begins with ##.
- gdevenyi 5y agoI'm surprised IRC is still a thing with the rise of Matrix, IMHO a modern replacement.
- wowaname 5y agoI think IRC is nearing the end of its usefulness, but I am under no illusion over why it's still in use, and I do not believe a "modern replacement" to be automatically better than other options.
- ben0x539 5y agoNot being replaced by modern replacements is pretty much IRC's thing. Edit: I guess https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/ makes that point better.
- lovich 5y agoI’ve never used IRC before so maybe someone can explain what the problem is here. My takeaway from reading this is that there are multiple irc networks. The author decided to move his bot and channel to a different network, and is angry that the freenode operator took back the abandoned channel. Is it expected in IRC channels that whoever started the channel owns it forever? What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it?
- geofft 5y agoMaybe here's an analogy: Verisign does something that YC doesn't like, so YC decides they don't trust being on .com anymore and they should move from ycombinator.com to ycombinator.party or something. They set up a web server that redirects from news.ycombinator.com to news.ycombinator.party, so that people who were looking for the old name still find it. Verisign decides that YC has abandoned the .com name, and points news.ycombinator.com at their own forum about news for hackers, with a target audience of fixed-point combinator enthusiasts. After all, "Y combinator" is just a term from a Haskell Curry paper. I think the norms around IRC are very similar to the norms around domains (or Twitter accounts, or so forth) - even if you use a somewhat generic name, whoever first lays claim to the name is entitled to keep it and do as much or as little with it, unless they affirmatively release it, and using the name to point someone elsewhere is definitely not abandoning it.
- toast0 5y ago> Is it expected in IRC channels that whoever started the channel owns it forever? What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it? It's been a long while since I was a regular IRC user and my channel was banned from channel services for reasons, but my understanding is that all the registrations have timeouts. If non of the channel operators show up in some period of time, the registration is cancelled. I'd imagine somewhere between 7 and 30 days would be the norm though.
- ben0x539 5y ago> What do they do to prevent people from quickly founding a channel around a new topic and squatting on it? I don't think this is a huge issue for IRC communities. Freenode in particular had a bureaucracy around #<name> channels to prevent this (and even that was rather ineffective in the single case I was almost-personally involved in), but ##<name> channels were explicitly more free-for-all.
- zamalek 5y ago> I decided to move my channel, ##hntop, to Liberachat. > This channel has moved to Liberachat, effective immediately To be fair, this is a very gray area and is not a cut-and-dry example of abuse of power. The op did express that they were moving on to Libera. Is the expectation that someone could squat (as per the new channel description) a channel for all perpetuity, even if they no longer participate on the platform? Conversely, rasengan really should have first had a conversation with the op, and did pull the trigger on this suspiciously quickly.
- na85 5y ago>Is the expectation that someone could squat (as per the new channel description) a channel for all perpetuity, even if they no longer participate on the platform? It's like that on some of the less-modern networks like EFnet. For a long time there were no services to automatically grant channel operator status and so folks would either amass a network of trusted humans large enough to pass the +o flag between each other as timezones awoke and went about their days, and/or they would herd large flocks of bots to perform the same.
- nickthegreek 5y agoEfnet and it’s non registered chaos is what drew me into computers and made me write my first lines of code. I really felt like a part of community having to hold channels. I learned so much about the underlying network protocols that made the internet work and went on to go to a vocation high school for networking. This story was actually confusing to me at first because I never really joined IRC servers that allowed the registrations of usernames let alone channels.
- wowaname 5y agoThe policies on freenode are very clear about ##-namespace channels expiring after several weeks of being unused, or after the founder drops their account. The user hl still has his eight-year-old account, is still logged in, and barely a week has gone by before the channel was taken over. freenode has always allowed communities to direct their channels to other platforms.
- thih9 5y agoFor people new to the topic, here’s a comment that tries to summarize recent Freenode events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27237202
- boboche 5y agoStarted my life on IRC what…over 30 yrs ago on irc.eff.org using a crappy 300 bauds modem. Back in the days there were no ads or tracking cookies on gopher, and first websites, only good stuff…, IRC had no drama and such crap. It didn’t last for long though, when undernet came along, and more kids were getting modems for xmas, dramma and powertrips started. Sad to say this is nothing new, human nature, that’s all.
- pmlnr 5y ago> IRC had no drama and such crap Your memories got nicer with time. Reminder that the internet was always the internet, from 1994, although the story is about USENET: https://www.wired.com/1994/05/alt-tasteless/ https://www.wired.com/1994/05/alt-tasteless/
- speeder 5y agoI am not seeing this post anymore on the frontpage, but it is not flagged either. Why is that?
- abstractbeliefs 5y agothe hn mods have moderated almost every post about the freenode takeover off the front page (several times off the #1 spot as well) I think it's clear that, at best, they don't want this discussion on the site, or at worst, rasengan is demanding it. Andrew Lee has sought to purchase/influence other similar sites in the past.
- proactivesvcs 5y agoI've seen many of them on the front page, so this cannot be true.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoThat doesn't necessarily follow; they could manually downrank things as they notice items coming up, which would let things hit the front page temporarily. (Not saying this happens, just that that's not a strong argument against)
- mschuster91 5y ago> I think it's clear that, at best, they don't want this discussion on the site For what it's worth, there's a lot of drama mongering in the whole FN saga, and it's usually the same arguments repeated on all sides - the HN mods are known to push this kind of story down after a while. No need to resort to conspiracy crap.
- rightisleft 5y agoSo many comments from folks who have never used IRC... makes me feel old
- rasengan 5y agoFreenode maintains a policy against spam [1]. This policy hasn’t changed for years. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact freenode support. Secondly, you come to conclusions that have no basis from your explanation. To be clear, freenode doesn’t “tap” private messages. [1] https://freenode.net/policies https://freenode.net/policies
- Foxboron 5y agoAndrew, the link clearly states you can't just take over channels. Why are you deferring to clearly void "policies"? How does this address any criticism?
- joepie91_ 5y agoI'm guessing that he's now going to claim that the policy change he instituted 5 hours ago that allows him to do this[1] has always been there. [1] https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/pull/513/commits/2037126831a84c57f978268f090fc663cf43ed7a https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/pull/513/commits/2037126...
- Foxboron 5y agoAh, I was waiting for just that.
- wut42 5y agoAre you implying that you are going to deny every community that envisages to leave your network to advertise to their users that they moved ?
- ben0x539 5y agoCould you quote the policy against spam?
- kodah 5y agoI think it's fairly clear that rasengan does not respect any kind of authority that derives from a framework, so you can't expect that he's going to magically adhere to Freenodes community rules. There's a fair mention of "IRC drama" in these comments and I'll say this: IRC has drama in the same way that HN does. The volume of people that call this place "the orange site" or refer to "HN's culture" while chiding about certain comments is orthogonal to the drama that happens in IRC. The difference is that you don't have dang as a mediator. Freenode (and now Libera) leave much of the operation up to channel owners, even if they want to put in place ridiculous rules. These operators are held to very little, it takes a large margin of abuse for them to be relieved of their channels. There's also a non-insignificant amount of people that believe bans are mostly earned, even if they're for ridiculous rules. So, while I get this drama looks pathetic, it's the same kind of drama that occurs here that outside observers would like also declare pathetic.
- blastonico 5y ago> engaging in routine abuses of power I wonder if people that really suffered from abuse of power will use the same term in this case. - I spent years in prison because of corrupt judge. - oh, that's nothing! Once I was using IRC when...
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoThat the power is small does not make it not abuse.
- ben0x539 5y agoIt's probably worth noting when people commit petty abuses of power so you know not to trust them with actual, important power.
- gwillen 5y agoAndrew Lee has now unilaterally rewritten Freenode policy to retroactively justify his actions: https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/commit/1194a3e71a427a669ccdddee22006416d46eeb43 https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/commit/1194a3e71a427a669...