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posted by mattie_p on Monday February 24 2014, @01:54AM   Printer-friendly
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?

Barrabas writes:

"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."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @07:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @07:54AM (#5663)

    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

    by Marand (1081) on Monday February 24 2014, @08:02AM (#5668) Journal

    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.

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @05:32PM (#5979)

      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.

      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.