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from the ancient-but-useful-technology dept.
What is IRC? It stands for internet relay chat, and despite being developed in 1988, it is still a very useful means of low-bandwidth communication, serving hundreds of thousands of users daily across the world. We have created our own IRC Server at irc.sylnt.us, port 6667. Won't you join us?
"Some have asked why we run our own servers instead of using a public one such as freenode.net. We did this to have control of the TOS, copyright, DMCA, and other legal issues. I like freenode (and their TOS) a lot, but we're building a community and we should make our own choices.
Landon, our overlord of IRC, set this up with a lot of help from his team. He also set us up a link-shortener sylnt.us domain for the Twitter account: that rocks! So send him some love if you see him on IRC - he's doing a bang-up job!
Speaking of Twitter, Bender, our IRC bot, posts the headlines to our Twitter account, so feel free to follow us there."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Monday February 24 2014, @07:31AM
Why isn't this IRC server using SSL? Most (if not all) IRC clients still developed understand and can use it, so there's no good reason not to provide is as an option. Preferably as the only option, actually, with no unencrypted connections allowed.
Considering the news that shows up here and on Slashdot on a regular basis about privacy, security, eavesdropping, etc., you would think some sort of encryption would have been first priority.
On the same note, links followed from RSS link to the site via http instead of https. This should be addressed as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @07:54AM
Somebody commented that IRC with SSL is like email with SSL, useless. While the connection from your box to the first server might be encrypted, there's no guarantee the rest of the connections before the recipient are.
Besides, if you want it, there is a SSL connection on irc.soylentnews.org:6697 with a self signed cert.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Marand on Monday February 24 2014, @08:02AM
Pithy quote but inherently wrong in regard to IRC.
There are IRC daemons with the capability to provide secure connections between servers on the network as well as providing SSL to the endpoints. Furthermore, if both endpoints are encrypted, it's easy enough to connect to the same server as the user you want to communicate with and not need to worry about if the server interlinking is encrypted as well, for the truly paranoid.
There's no reason at all SSL shouldn't be default. Just because you can argue "well, it might not be fully secure" is no excuse to half-ass it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @05:32PM
Incomplete security can be worse than no security because it can give a false impression of security which is not there, making people act as if the security were there. If there's no security at all (and that fact is visible, as in not using SSL), people know that they should not trust it and use other communication channels if they need security.
(Score: 1) by omoc on Monday February 24 2014, @11:12AM
While I use IRC a lot I give my "no thanks" already to a private IRC server. No SSL is equally ludicrous as the reasons not to use one of the big public networks. The whole idea behind Soylent was to make things more independent. If you fuck things up, the freenode channel will still exists while your shiny private IRC server will be gone. Thanks, but no thanks.
(Score: 2) by dmc on Monday February 24 2014, @06:24PM
Your statement is illogical. Doing things the way you describe makes SN _dependent_ on freenode. While SN doing their own IRC makes them _more independent_. Just like the ancient slashcode, there may be all sorts of reasons why an independent SN IRC infra might burn to the ground. But the whole point of doing _truly_ independent infra, is because you realize that despite failure and rebuilding being a necessary part of the process, the end result is far better than depending on other massive infra with overlords that can be corrupted by advertisers or government censors. Freenode may or may not be wonderful today, but just like slashdot, who knows what their next forced Beta will look like after some new overlords drive a dumptruck full of money up to their houses.
(Score: 1) by omoc on Monday February 24 2014, @07:29PM
apparently you do not understand how IRC networks operate
(Score: 1) by Landon on Monday February 24 2014, @03:06PM
SSL has been in since the start on the usual port 6697. For now it's a self signed cert until things get a little more stable here and certs are handed out like candy to the various subdomains :)
(I'm pushing towards mandatory SSL myself, but that's a future improvement)
(Score: 1) by Marand on Monday February 24 2014, @04:19PM
Good to know, thanks. Shame it wasn't mentioned in the summary itself.
Fight hard for that, because it's one of the biggest benefits of running your own ircd for SN instead of using freenode. Mandatory encryption could be touted as a feature, or used as a counterpoint for why you choose to host your own instead of using an existing network.
It's something that should happen sooner rather than later, though; changing it late risks annoying people by a sudden change after they've gotten accustomed to current behaviour.
Above all, though: good luck. Whether I join in or not, I'm happy to see protocols like IRC used in appropriate places, instead of yet another grafting of unrelated crap onto HTTP regardless of suitability. It's a shame that IRC lost most of its momentum since the '90s to things like Facebook and IM clients, though not surprising. Openness is harder to monetise, track, and control.
(Score: 1) by cykros on Tuesday February 25 2014, @02:22AM
IRC lost steam? Someone forgot to tell those of us who've been on it the whole time and haven't noticed so much as a blip.
Sure, it's not what everyone uses, but then, I wouldn't say it necessarily should be anyway (not everyone engages in group chats in the first place). XMPP, otoh, would be nice to see universally adopted (in a truly open, federated manner), but then, plenty of companies have a vested interest in keeping that from happening, so I won't hold my breath.
IRC has weathered the 2010s fairly smoothly compared to most other non-www protocols on the Internet as far as I've been able to tell. Usenet has fallen into a small niche, ftp is essentially dead in the water, and even email is something that people seem to grudgingly use for work, and not much else when they can avoid it. IRC's done a pretty bangup job remaining relevant, on the other hand, though the landscape is quite a bit different these days, as well, we're not the only ones who see forking off our own server/network as being a good idea. The days of everything being on EFNet are certainly long over.
In any case, if there was the perception that IRC lost steam, then I guess welcome back to those who are realizing that wasn't the case :-P.
(Score: 1) by Marand on Tuesday February 25 2014, @01:59PM
Compared to the late '90s and early 2000s, it definitely lost momentum. Freenode, by far the largest network currently, is only managing about half the users of Dalnet at its prime. That's not even getting into Undernet and EFnet, which were busier networks most of the time. Where websites used to invite readers to join discussion on IRC via their channel and network of choice, it moved to forum software and things like disqus or Facebook.
I never said it died because, like you said, it's healthier than a lot of other protocols that have all but vanished, but it still lost a lot of people over the years, despite more people than ever on the internet daily.
Personally, I never stopped using IRC, but I watched the trends shift and others move away from it, especially outside of open source dev circles. So, any time I see someone decide to host a network or start a channel to go with their website, especially one that has potential of becoming large, it makes me happy.
I agree about the XMPP sentiment, by the way. XMPP is great, and when Google federated* their server, I enjoyed being able to run my own server and still be able to communicate with less tech-savvy friends that only had to sign up for gmail and got the XMPP support as a freebie. It looked like it was going to be another big player, an open protocol in the style of email, where everyone could cross-communicate. Unfortunately, everybody took it for their own use and turned off federation, though, so now it's just a pre-built walled garden for the likes of Facebook and Google.
* I'm still pissed about them removing federation and pushing toward their Hangouts and G+ bullshit, but that's too far off-topic to get into here.
(Score: 1) by Barrabas on Monday February 24 2014, @04:47PM
We're not using SSL because our current host doesn't support AAAA or A6 records in the zone file. (Our IRC supports IPV6, we just can't configure the host to use it.)
We're moving to linodes and should have this fixed very soon, probably within 2 weeks.
(Score: 1) by Landon on Monday February 24 2014, @04:59PM
I think you had a minor brainfart between IPV6 and SSL :)
(We do have irc.sylnt.us pointed to the IRC server's ipv6, but preferably use irc.soylentnews.org, like Barrabas says it will be fixed soon)