The Lurker

The second coming

I don't think I've ever been on a dalnet server, but I was reading a discussion on K5 about its apparent disappearance (it's still there, but they've disabled some convenient DNS entries which are being used in denial of service attacks), which led me to this fascinating news post on IRCNews.com (which doesn't make permanent links too easy to find, though the story will probably end up archived at the end of this month):

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA -- Amid near-crisis levels on the DALnet IRC network, Dave Kopstain (taz) has one again grabbed the reigns and taken over as the network's top administrator, much to the delight of many DALnet volunteers and sponsors.

The network had long been one of the world's most prosperous IRC networks, however lately it has fallen on hard times. DALnet is now under a microscope with many of its own server administrators and outside observers watching the network closely. Kopstain's re-emergence has been applauded by several key DALnet personel contacted for this story.

This is taz's second tenure as the network's CEO. His first run as the network chief lasted two years and came to an end in September 2002 when Sven Nielson (dalvenjah) unexpectedly took back the job he vacated in 2000.

I'm fascinated by the gravity of the language used here. Why do people take IRC so seriously? The system itself doesn't require the dictatorships that inevitably seem to pop up in certain networks and channels — and in fact it makes going somewhere else when that happens trivially easy. I remember once being the victim of a "channel takeover". What this means is that the people who were actually chatting in #abcd moved to #dcba, and #abcd remained silent until the "attackers" left. So fucking what?

This dalnet problem is a result of a distributed denial of service attack. I just cannot understand why anybody would hate an IRC network enough to do this. Even assuming the security exploits are readily available and require little knowledge or effort to deploy onto hundreds of unsuspecting people's computers, why would anybody waste their time looking for vulnerable machines to set the attack up in the first place?

A few months ago I was following with some amusement the controversy over the OpenProjects IRC network on Advogato's recent diary entries page. Basically, the guy who started OPN was unemployed and wanted people to donate money so he could run OPN full-time. He regularly sent out messages to all users connected to OPN begging for donations. At the time, OPN was the most common place for free software projects to have an IRC channel. Some people were annoyed to be sent these messages in the first place, while others objected to the idea of donating money to a person who was not actually providing the actual servers and network connectivity. Since then, OpenProjects has changed its name to Freenode, coinciding with moves to turn it into a not-for-profit corporation, and perhaps more importantly the donation messages are no longer sent to all users. But the donation drive seemed to be the last straw for a lot of OPN inhabitants.

In the past, people had complained about being kicked and banned from OPN channels without good reason. People are always whingeing about being kicked out of IRC channels, but OPN's server software implements a controversial protocol change which allows operators to kick users out of a channel while making it appear to others that the user left in the ordinary manner. There are RFCs documenting the IRC protocol (2810-2813, which replace 1459), but neither the current documents nor their predecessor accurately describe all variations on the IRC protocol which exist in the wild. Still, making a KICK look like a PART seems downright deceptive to me, and I can't see a legitimate use for it.

This ended up being quite a ramble. Oh well. What was my point again? Umm... don't take it all so seriously. If you don't like how people are behaving, kick them out if it's "your" channel. If it isn't yours, it's really easy to go somewhere else.

Related topics: Rants IRC Mindless Link Propagation