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Why are people still using IRC? It has no encryption, no privacy. Even if your client uses encrypted comms, the other clients are not, so everything is easily
by koheripbal 5y ago
Why are people still using IRC? It has no encryption, no privacy. Even if your client uses encrypted comms, the other clients are not, so everything is easily surveilled.
I'm surprised people are still using IRC at all.
- nicoburns 5y agoWhy do you post on HN? It's not encrypted either. In fact, it's very explicitly publicly available. IRC is the same. It is and always has been public. And for many use cases that's a benefit not a drawback.
- capableweb 5y agoPeople generally use IRC for public conversations, not for private ones. IRC is a open protocol, has a ton of different clients for different needs, almost every big FOSS project has it's own IRC channel and it requires minimal resources to run (and if you really need to, the protocol itself is really easy to implement). What's not to like with IRC? I'm surprised people are using Slack and Discord instead of IRC for development talk.
- jfrunyon 5y agoThis is false. Many, many IRC clients implement encryption, both in one-to-one and group (channel) forms. That's the beauty of IRC. The client can support almost anything it wants to. And if you don't like one client... there's another one for you to try! You want to see everyone's memes inline? Clients can do that. You want to see emoji? Clients can do that. You want to have encryption, or voice, or send files? Clients can easily at the very least negotiate that over IRC. Edit: And by the way, most servers offer a mode that allows you to require that everyone joining be using TLS, or of course you could run your own server and simply have it only listen for TLS!