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IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)
- cmdrfred 12y ago<CaptainJ> THE LIBERATION OF KUAIT HAS BEGUN <Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <Goofa> The liberation of Kuwait has begun. <Anipa> Mr Fritzwalter: the liberation of Kuwait has begun <Tylenol> WAR HAS STARTED!!!! <Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- keehun 12y ago<MistDrake> Announcement from the president of US: The liberation of Kuwait has begun <Arkie> i'm listening to nbc radio.... <Starhawk> "Desert Storm"
- sheetjs 12y ago#Belladona# Bagdad Radio reports Saddam has ordered his troops out of Kuwait IMMEDIATELY! #Scott# unconfirmed, keep it to +war/+report #alex# belladona - stop making rumors ....
- rdl 12y agoI wonder if the IRC logs from the Iraq War (round 2) will ever be declassified and released. IRC is used pretty extensively by the military for communications (generally just called "mIRC", since people associate it so strongly with the official military client), and there were a bunch of different channels on different networks to discuss operations in realtime. http://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/ http://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/
- thefreeman 12y agoFYI for some reason MalwareBytes treats that link as malicious.
- maaku 12y agoMilitary client? mIRC is shareware: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC
- malvim 12y agoI think he meant mIRC (the shareware software) is the official IRC client of the military.
- baby 12y agoyup, from wikipedia: > mIRC is part of the communication infrastructure of the US military,[15] which includes controlling unmanned airstrikes from the DGS-4 in Ramstein Air Base.[16][17]
- count 12y agoHeh, they use the full paid version. I always wondered who KMB got cash from...
- Nilzor 12y agoDidn't he have like 9 paying users after 15 years or so? Poor guy :) Could have needed some monetization strategy advice
- msutherl 12y ago<Lipstick> I dont think bagdahd is on the net =] <BOY> No arab countrys on the net..
- melloclello 12y agoArchived SomethingAwful thread from 9/11/2001: http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html > WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR
- TeMPOraL 12y agoFrom the thread: > Now this is weird, since last week was the first showing of that X-files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" in Austalia. The plot of the first one was that some government group was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. Life imitates art? Eee... WHAT? I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.
- shepardrtc 12y agoNope. For another example, see Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor
- icegreentea 12y agoClearly they meant the general public thought it was outside the realm of things that would actually happen, as opposed to realistic seeming (yet safely 'impossible') things of fiction. For example Tom Clancy's Debt of Honour wraps up with a Japanese airliner flying into the Capitol Building killing off the majority of the US Government.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoNo, I believed that it was outside the realm of imagination, that the concept of flying a passenger plane into a building as a form of suicide attack never entered the collective mind of the society. I stand corrected though, thank you and shepardrtc for the Tom Clancy reference. I guess one gets to learn something new every day ;).
- ilaksh 12y agoI'd like to see IRC logs from other countries at the same time. As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil_reserves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil... Hmm. I wonder what the IRC logs of the Venezuelan "liberation" will look like? Actually for Venezuelan's sake hopefully the economic warfare already going on, along with the encroachment coming from the direction of Brazil during World Cup, will be enough to "integrate" them into the system (i.e. "liberate" them of control over their resources) without requiring overt military action.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago> As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions. I like that idea. It could be really interesting and educating to play with an interactive map showing that. There are things like that appearing from time to time (like the article about Syria and Iraq from yesterday[0]); I hope that concept trend will catch on and we'll see more and more old and modern history knowledge expressed in interactive, explorable forms. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305
- ilaksh 12y agoI think it would be good to have a map and timeline like that going back to the 10th century. Because I think that people _really_ could use some perspective.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoKind of an unified, explorable map of historical events, in which you can see how the borders looked like, could see various information overlays like trade routes, major wars, events, etc.? It's quite an endeavour but I believe a worthy one, and I hope a project like that will start soon. This could have tremendous effect on people. It's BretVictoresque stuff, things that could expand the space of thoughts we have, and vastly increase our comprehention of information available.
- Houshalter 12y agoThis is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this: <Swan/+report> test to see if infoserver is echoing messages to group +war. well all this info is probably old. The iraqis caused an oil spill 8-10 miles long and a couple miles wide. It's 12 times the size of that caused by the exxon valdeez. It's not known if wells are actively pumping into the gulf right now, or if they just dumped stored reserves. If they're pumping at max capacity, it'll get bigger by a factor every 3 days. in other words it will be 13 times the size of the exxon valdeez in 3 days, 14 in 6, 15 in 9. (I realize I said that wrong). That's a worst case. It's not possible to overstate how concerned Bush seemed by this. I think he aged a few years last night. the spill is not military significant, but ecologically its a nightmare of course. There is some concern about water problems, the oil might threaten desalination plants. Yesterday the weather was much better over iraq, so they set a record for the # of sorties in a single day. 2700 I think. they launched 2 missiles at saudi arabia today, and 7 at israel. (scuds). One hit in israel, lightly wounding a bunch of people, killing 1. 1 person died in saudi. Patriots knocked out a whole bunch of them. I just heard from Cheneys mouth that Bush has something planned to deal with the oil spill. --mcneil lehrer
- jdong 12y agoThis message seems to be way too long for IRC. edit: I really don't get why people are downvoting this, the message appears to have at least 1298 characters.
- The_Pherocity 12y agoExplain please?
- jdong 12y agoIRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.
- SoftwareMaven 12y agoI remember very clearly sitting in my first math class in my first term of college, talking about the Gulf War when it started. I was 18 at the time. The big concern we had was another Vietnam, dragging on for years with a new draft. There was a lot of talk on campus about that, until it became clear the war was not going to last long.
- Afforess 12y agoMirror zipped archive of all 39 IRC logs from the OP's link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/desert-storm.7z https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/desert-storm.7z
- Asparagirl 12y agoFile #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits: <Ran> Is there anybody there? I am fine. Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears". IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...
- xelfer 12y agoI miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.
- imdsm 12y agoI've been on Freenode for almost 10 years now (9 years, 48 weeks, 4 days, 18:19:12 ago), it's the only network which doesn't seem to be shrinking, though most of my old friends are gone now.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Pacabel 12y agoA lot of the decline was due to people being driven away, directly or indirectly, by tyrannical ops. A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth. But as the community became larger and more established, certain users would often end up becoming ops, and they'd start to enforce their own beliefs upon the entire community. People would start getting kicked or banned unnecessarily for very minor "violations", which most often involved just holding a different opinion than an op. These kicked or banned users wouldn't come back, those users who liked them would have less incentive to return, and eventually there'd be more people getting booted or leaving than there would be new people coming and returning. The channel withers. If this happens with enough channels, the network withers. As networks wither, IRC itself withers.
- pling 12y agoIRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade. I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.
- sentenza 12y agoThat was truly a moment in the spotlight for Slashdot. It's just sad that it has mostly died due to continued neglect.
- icpmacdo 12y agoI wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.
- pling 12y agoWell Twitter is where everyone goes now when something is broken. I'm not sure its the right solution but it's part of the way there.
- jpgvm 12y agoTwitter and all of these other commercial services lack the sheer resiliency of IRC. Taking down an IRC network (assuming DNS is not affected or users have cached list of servers in their client) is incredibly difficult. Twitter doesn't fail-whale as often but it's still centralised and not overly reliable or robust in comparison.
- andor 12y agoTaking down an IRC network (assuming DNS is not affected or users have cached list of servers in their client) is incredibly difficult. Yes, but remember that DDoSing individual servers and taking over channels through the resulting netsplits was a favorite pastime of bored teenagers around the world.
- mineo 12y agoThe website doesn't seem to work reliably at the moment, here's the archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20131021002154/http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/Gulf-War/desert-storm/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131021002154/http://www.ibibli...
- tottenhm 12y agoWent to watch the July 4 fireworks in SF tonight, but it was cloudy, causing the fireworks to soften into a vague burst of color. I thought, "This looks just like CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. Except without all the fear and death. Damn, I'm lucky -- no war here!"
- nikanj 12y agoThe rest of the world would prefer the US to have its wars on its own soil though.
- ganessh 12y agoNo access
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pantalaimon 12y agoCan we please make #hackernews on freenode a thing again?
- wmil 12y agoWho would go there? It'd be hacker news without the news (articles).
- Kiro 12y agoWhat's the context?
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