Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down

184 132 6 years ago

myu701• 6 years ago

So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is?

On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie?

IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.

Operyl• 6 years ago

Having used IRC, not that big of a deal in my opinion. Most channels run their own log archives, and you always have your own.

ryanong• 6 years ago

IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server.

There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was free.

barkingcat3• 6 years ago

yah, but this particular service, which is a logging server run by an individual, isn't really all that significant in the grand scheme of things.

ghostpepper3• 6 years ago

If Freenode was shutting down it would be closer to "gmail is shutting down" IMHO.

abstractbeliefs• 6 years ago

Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?

neilv• 6 years ago

Agreed. Freenode was (and should still be, IMHO) the go-to real-time chat for open source projects.

I didn't realize how important at the time it was being founded. Rob Levin was an online acquaintance, and one day he started asking about how to fund an open source community service with donations. I was interested in open source and non-profits, so he and I talked a bit about that, but I didn't volunteer to help. Next thing I knew, he'd started Freenode, and projects flocked to it.

barkingcat3• 6 years ago

unofficial irc logging services are kinda like the "I don't want to pay anyone, but I want to freeload off someone's netflix account" of the irc age.

If the material was important to someone, they would already be connected with a bouncer or logger of some kind. For people who can't run bouncers, etc, this is a good service, but again - if you really thought it was vital to your work and/or personal life, you would have spent some money to either purchase an irc service (like irccloud, etc) or pay someone to run a proper logging service.

The historical aspects are not nearly as dire in my opinion, - all someone has to do is to get a copy of the archive from this person (who doesn't seem opposed to this idea) - and host it somewhere. Again, the problem is costs - if someone deamed it important enough, they will mirror it.

In this age, probably someone like the Internet Archive since no one will pay for the maintenance (legally, technically, and otherwise).

1996• 6 years ago

freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing.

The logs - depend on your stance. For what I do, no logs is better. Fewer logs may drive more people back. But here are many other loggers.

FYI, IRC is still very handy to have and deploy in 2020. It is light enough for a small VPS to handle, easy to scale by federating if needed, and the lack of file support and of logs can be a feature to keep everything private for in house deployments.

Just this morning I started to evaluate replacing some Javascript and Go code by some Fortran.

I'm starting to believe in the army motto: "Yesterday technology, tomorrow!"

snvzz5• 6 years ago

freenode is the place where discussion happens. It is not closing. If it was, it would be equivalent to gmail closing.

And it wouldn't kill IRC. Projects would just relocate to other irc networks, such as oftc. Some new networks might emerge.

cbm-vic-20• 6 years ago

IRC is still hanging in there. You can get a taste by using the web UI, no registration required.

1) Go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ 2) Type something into the "Nick" box. 3) Solve the CAPTCHA 4) Hit Start.

Freenode has thousands of channels, there's a bot called "alis" that can help you find something interesting. To do that:

5) type "/msg alis list python -min 50", which will open a chat with alis, which will then show the channels with "python" in the name that have at least 50 users. 6) type "/join #python" to join the channel

Some channels require you to register before you can chat, for that, see https://freenode.net/kb/answer/registration

rhizome• 6 years ago

First of all, you're not too young for IRC, it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels! Depending on your interests your usage could resemble a live-action Reddit.

Second, I don't think this is necessarily a big deal, though I could imagine that channel users liked the convenience of having their channel logged for them. There may even have been an ersatz Slack use-case there that people could easily get used to.

However, channel logging has historically been the responsibility of channel users themselves, so there's a loss of convenience that could easily be taken up by a channel user setting up their own facility: a tiny AWS instance running a bot logging to S3, with a web interface and maybe a search engine. But that takes time and money and maintenance and interest.

However, all of this functionality is out there on the web and internet, and has been used for a long time in various incarnations. I'm sure there are EFNet logs out there that go back well into the 90s.

michaelcampbell• 6 years ago

it's still out there! Lots of people! Lots of channels!

s/channels/code So is COBOL.

txdv• 6 years ago

there are dozens of us! dozens!

uk_programmer2• 6 years ago

IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.

IRC has a ton of advantages:

1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school.

2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting.

3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison

4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language.

https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/

5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself.

e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language

6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time.

7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server.

8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server.

barkingcat3• 6 years ago

re Discord, the funny thing is that Discord is proprietary, and I'm not sure how exportable any data and/or voice/embeds are when you want to download it out of the service itself.

gknoy• 6 years ago

the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.

For me, the thing that Discord does really well is having a persistent message history, so I can join a server about a topic, see the pinned posts, read an FAQ channel, and learn a bunch without having to ask a question. That may be improved with IRC now, but at least when I was last using it (wow, 2 decades ago?!) that was a real pain point.

ori_b• 6 years ago

IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical help and discussion for most projects.

hguant• 6 years ago

The various haskell IRC channels are some of the best places to learn and get help/mentoring with that language - so many patient, genuinely helpful people. It's one of those things that made me go "Oh, that's what everyone is moaning abut" re demise of the old web etc.

echelon• 6 years ago

It absolutely still is.

If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow, or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have an answer in under five minutes and an interactive explanation.

IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam, advertisement, and noise.

idclip• 6 years ago

If gmail had a dad who was more famous and more successful in a world no one remembered anymore.

Think of the father in “there will be blood”.

dhodell3• 6 years ago

I've used IRC for over 20 years and have never heard of this service. On your scale, it's "your second cousin's friend's sister's dog's goldfish had a VPS that went down."

This is #2 on HN because people are reading "Freenode IRC ... is shutting down." That'd be closer to the gmail end of your spectrum. We are not shutting down freenode.

ken• 6 years ago

This is just one logging service, not any actual IRC servers. So today's news is not necessarily a huge deal.

IRC as a system, though, is massively important. I'd say it's like the Twitter of the first half (so far) of the internet. When the (first) Gulf War began, the first reports were via IRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990835

infogulch• 6 years ago

I wonder if archive.org would be interested...

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

Already pushed WARC files into the Archive for Wayback ingestion.

rasengan6• 6 years ago

I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10].

IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!

IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others.

You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24].

[1] https://freenode.net

[2] https://oftc.net

[3] https://rizon.net

[4] https://www.dal.net

[5] https://tildeverse.org

[6] https://snoonet.org/

[7] https://quakenet.org/

[8] https://efnet.org

[9] https://ircnet.com

[10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php

[11] https://weechat.org/

[12] https://kiwiirc.com

[13] https://codeux.com/textual

[14] https://palaverapp.com/

[15] https://mirc.com/

[16] https://adiirc.com/

[17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot

[18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot

[19] https://kiwiirc.com/

[20] https://znc.in

[21] https://irccloud.com/

[22] https://quassel-irc.org/

[23] https://www.bitlbee.org/

[24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc

Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!

Avamander2• 6 years ago

You've missed the best IRC bouncer-client there is - Quassel.

eloahx3• 6 years ago

jbnc :D

anthk4• 6 years ago

Add Bitlbee to the list and you can do magic.

Avamander2• 6 years ago

Bitlbee needs some work. I don't think there's a single plugin for it that actually works properly.

toxik• 6 years ago

How can you not list QuakeNet?!

_e• 6 years ago

irc.mtv.com isn't on the list

kick2• 6 years ago

What happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

rasengan6• 6 years ago

Keep an eye out! :)

airstrike• 6 years ago

If only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone out there is willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you coffee so I can switch over from irssi

mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days

rasengan6• 6 years ago

Another option is to try cygwin [1] as it has a weechat build [2]. Weechat also runs under WSL [3].

[1] https://cygwin.com/

[2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Geeflow2• 6 years ago

My first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years after the last release.

graton• 6 years ago

Seems like you can run it under Windows Subsystem for Linux.

andarleen2• 6 years ago

Is Rizon still the crime haven it was?

amyjess• 6 years ago

From what I understand, most of the fansubbing community there has moved to Discord.

buovjaga• 6 years ago

The awesome list: https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc

Supybot's successor is Limnoria: https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria

GitHub plugin: https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-plugins/tree/master/GitHu...

Btw. on the topic of bouncers, Simon Ser is developing a new one in Go: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju

efdee2• 6 years ago

No IRCnet or EFnet mention?

I don't want to be a part of this.

rasengan6• 6 years ago

Agreed and has been included now, I apologize for that! Please take part in this! IRC is community.

admax88q2• 6 years ago

www.dal.net not dal.net

rasengan6• 6 years ago

Fixed, thank you!

matheusmoreira• 6 years ago

Can IRC be used through Tor and with end-to-end encryption?

hkt4• 6 years ago

It depends on the network. Freenode has a tor ingress: https://freenode.net/news/tor-online

You can connect with SSL and optionally SASL (as well as cloaking your IP) but this is encrypted to the server. Most of IRC is public anyway though so E2E doesn't make total sense.

LinuxBender• 6 years ago

Yes, IRC servers can support or enforce TLS for the transport and end users can use OTR (Off The Record) with many IRC clients. IRC uses TCP which Tor supports. There are IRC servers on Tor. Here [1] is an example of WeeChat + OTR. OTR is E2E encryption.

[1] https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr

Polylactic_acid3• 6 years ago

IRC is still alive in the fact that people still use it, but its dying (less people use it over time) in a way that will never be overcome.

IRC is lacking so many critical features that people consider the fundamentals of IM now. IRCv3 has been in development for forever and they still aren't done and even if they finished it it would never make it to all the irc servers and clients.

At this point it makes sense to join most other open source projects in moving to Matrix which still has active development and the ability to actually push out new spec changes in the current decade.

TylerE• 6 years ago

The mere fact that we always see several people jumping in to assert how IRC is alive and kicking is in fact a giveaway that it, if not actually dying, is at least starting to smell a bit funny. (And frankly I say - good riddance! It's a protocol that's at least a decade past it's sell-by date, modern options are so much better)

wdutch• 6 years ago

I think IRC will always have a place in certain communities.

I drop into IRC whenever I need help with an Arduino project or want to catchup with old colleagues. From my own personal experience, all the open source communities I get involved with use IRC and I have never known one use Matrix, sometimes this is for personal reasons and sometimes for work. This probably depends on what techie circles you move in.

I've also noticed IRC is more popular in certain countries. Anecdotally Brazil and Sweden seem to have fairly large communities of nontechnical people on IRC.

Maybe for some people, IRC does what they want and they don't need any updated spec.

tr33house• 6 years ago

I also use mosh to maintain a constant connection to a remote server with an irc client

em-bee2• 6 years ago

this list exemplifies the biggest issue i have with IRC. it's not federated. these are all islands, and i'd have to sign up on each one of them to join the community there.

that said, none of the newer alternatives are any better unfortunately.

it seems jabber really was the only federated system with any moderate success, and maybe matrix is getting there too with its ability to integrate different services.

badsectoracula• 6 years ago

FWIW you do not need to 'sign up' on IRC, just pick up an unused nickname and you're in. No registration or anything necessary.

bluedays• 6 years ago

IRC is where you go to play the idle game, right?

snvzz5• 6 years ago

On DOS, there's mtcp's ircjr.

On AmigaOS, amirc (which many clients cloned the UI of) and wookiechat.

Even kolibriOS ships an irc client.

It's a nice, simple protocol that's human readable and imposes very little overhead on the clients.

anthk4• 6 years ago

I miss gopher support on kolibriOS, it's the brother "simple" protocol for hypermedia. No TLS support as IRC, but you can either: - use TOR over a gopher client. - use and promote Gemini in paralell.

With Bitlbee and sacc(1) I can access even HN via Gopher and comment it on Telegram via sic(1). Magical and my setup could work even under a 286 with Minix2.

josteink• 6 years ago

I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking!

Yes IRC has an impressive list of servers, clients and networks built up over the last 3-4 decades.

Outside the major hubs (freenode) and FOSS channels though, actual usage seems to be going down.

IRC is no longer the “default” for chat, like it used to be.

And I say that as someone heavily invested in IRC, operating an IRC-network for almost 2 decades.

kgraves• 6 years ago

Can I use this on my iPhone? I haven't been able to find easy to use ones.

uniquelygeneric• 6 years ago

I prefer Igloo IRC, but finding a server and chatroom is an exercise you'll have to do on your own depending on what you are looking for. I would start with Freenode if you don't know where to begin.

mwest• 6 years ago

The screenshots for Igloo look nice, but the developer responses to reviews are... entertaining, and concerning.

mattl• 6 years ago

I use IRCCloud, the app is decent.

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

This is sad because BotBot.me shut down not that long ago too.

We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment. https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/

perlgeek2• 6 years ago

I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the perl/raku communities, but also other channels).

Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly impossible to me, so I shut down some time ago. (It might have violated earlier privacy regulations as well, hard to tell).

Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it goes to court, none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own lawyer seemed too expensive, and nobody who asked me to continue running it offered to pay for a lawyer either. Tough luck.

kirstenbirgit• 6 years ago

what do you imagine would have happened if you kept it running?

perlgeek2• 6 years ago

There's a 80% chance that nothing would have happened, a 15% chance that people would complain about the privacy implications but won't do anything about it, and a 5% chance that somebody takes action and I get some sort of legal citation/penalty/whatever.

All percentages estimations only, of course :-)

jtakkala2• 6 years ago

A long time ago parsing Echelog logs was how I was able to monitor the IRC activity of an attacker at a company I used to work at. I didn't normally sit on these channels myself, but Echelog enabled me to look back and collect data on the various handles that this person operated under.

There were 20-something handles they used over approximately a 6 month period of monitoring. I was always able to find a small piece of information to correlate these handles together. Sometimes it started with a hunch, such as the language (even slang) they would use, but eventually they'd slip up in some way and we'd have a pretty irrefutable link to the person.

This information helped us develop a motive behind the hack and the ongoing public info was then fed to national crime agencies. My employer never went through with prosecution, but as this person was of much interest behind other hacks they were eventually prosecuted and convicted. I always wondered if my occasional Echelog intelligence reports ever had a role in that conviction.

unixhero3• 6 years ago

For the record, careful with doing private investigations. It might look good on Netflix, but can turn sour real fast.

cutemonster• 6 years ago

What can happen?

jdsully2• 6 years ago

I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.

overcast• 6 years ago

I'd stay off the internet then.

jdsully2• 6 years ago

Simpler times my friend.

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

Are you planning to delete this comment in a couple of days?

guerrilla• 6 years ago

"not everything" differs from "nothing"

str34ml1n3• 6 years ago

HN only lets you delete comments that are less than something like 2 hours old, I think.

Geeflow2• 6 years ago

I would have shared the same sentiment.

I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active on IRC. Are loggers a more recent (as in this millenium) development?

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

I would say chat history and asymmetrical scheduling for chat are expectations in this day and age, and the lack of them is one of the biggest reasons people find IRC irritating or difficult. (I ask a question, and if the person fit to answer it isn't logged in right now, it never gets even responded to.)

Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack, etc. allows you to see messages while you were offline. Compared to things from the older eras of messaging like AIM and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone unless they were online as well.

So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a relatively more modern element: They're filling in a gap IRC has with modern chat clients.

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

You probably did without realizing it. A persistently logged in user (through e.g. a bouncer, or just someone not rebooting too often) is essentially a logger. Those logs are private by their nature, but where I IRCed it was common for channels to each have their own logging bot.

kawsper• 6 years ago

Things like pisg[0] have existed since 2001 and it works off the logs directly, its usually collected by a bot and summarized into what you can see here: https://www.nordicbots.com/?id=66&net=quakenet&cid=84959

[0] http://pisg.sourceforge.net/

ciupicri2• 6 years ago

Unfortunately Facebook and Google also log everything. At least Facebook lets you delete your copy, but Google does not allow even this.

Wingman4l7• 6 years ago

I kinda doubt that Facebook actually deletes, as opposed to setting a DB flag... weren't they caught logging comments that were typed in but then modified / deleted / not actually posted?

gnramires2• 6 years ago

that's why you use pseudonyms ;)

kick2• 6 years ago

Pseudonyms aren't a silver bullet.

djsumdog• 6 years ago

I run a mastodon server on the fediverse (distributed social networking over activitypub). Mastodon and Pleroma support deletes, but say you post something and someone boosts it and one of their followers sees it on a server your server blocks.

You won't see their replies obviously (split thread) but if you delete the message, it gets deleted from your followers, but won't continue on to the server that your server blocks. So a copy will continue to exist.

I just treat the fediverse as a big chatroom/reddit thread that can never be deleted.

Polylactic_acid3• 6 years ago

I just treat the fediverse as a big chatroom/reddit thread that can never be deleted.

Treat the whole internet that way. You can't forcefully delete things from other peoples computers/minds. The best you can do is request.

I deal with this by posting almost nothing under my real name and switching usernames regularly.

wicket2• 6 years ago

The difference here is that Freenode is not used so much for informal chat as with other IRC servers. Many free software projects use Freenode as the primary communication method for project coordination, and in this case it is essential to keep logs. Not everyone is online 100% of the time and logs enable everyone to catch up if they've been offline.

dhodell3• 6 years ago

Sure, but those projects can also trivially set up logging with their own bots and in their own clients, with better control of what is logged, when, why, and how those logs are shared. This service appears to have logged fewer than 100 channels. This wasn't an aggregate logger and anyway aggregate logging probably isn't permissible anyway due to GDPR.

jfindley• 6 years ago

Yes, I agree. Lots(most?) of channels on freenode are explicitly not publicly logged anywhere, and the freenode staff are pretty helpful at helping chanops enforce this. None of the channels I help run have any public logs available.

shric• 6 years ago

Perhaps a naive question, but how do chanops enforce this? What's to stop someone lurking in a channel and publishing a log. You can't obviously connect an individual lurker to a log and busy channels have dozens of 24/7 clients connected.

andarleen2• 6 years ago

I am surprised that privacy aware companies are not using IRC more for their intra company chat, and that none invested in a webcam voice chat client for IRC. Even the most basic server can handle thousands of clients.

hkt4• 6 years ago

I recall working at companies where the ops or DevOps teams would run their own IRC servers pre-slack. It was basically the only way to get stuff done if you had a desktop PC and needed to work closely with anyone. The problem is that most companies don't know how to do due diligence on a tool like IRC and the clients aren't very friendly. The lack of commercialisation of the space is what prevented companies from paying for it, and that meant no easy and rich clients got built, which meant it never got commercialised, etc etc..

eloahx3• 6 years ago

I have an irc server, no rules, nothing illegal though. we have fun! irc.t60group.org +6697 #kotu

hkt4• 6 years ago

Honestly, it is sad but I grew up on IRC. Time to put all those ill advised remarks to bed..

superkuh• 6 years ago

Sad to see GDPR still slowly killing anything too small to pay a legal team (basically anything that can be sued that hasn't incorporated, ie, human persons).

Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running the site, no longer makes sense for me.

snvzz5• 6 years ago

Good riddance. I like irc more when I don't have to measure every word I say because some douchebag is silently logging everything and putting it in a website for everybody to see, index and archive, without my permission or anybody else's.

Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down

Related Stories