Jarkko Oikarinen wrote Internet Relay Chat (IRC) at the Department of Information Processing Science of the University of Oulu, in Finland, 30 years ago. Even today, people are still using IRC and it is an essential communication tool for many distributed teams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @09:15PM (13 children)
People still use IRC? I thought everyone uses Discord now. Who knew?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 25 2018, @09:31PM (1 child)
Many years ago I met a man who was into the "darker side" of the internet. He frequented BBS's and was into warez, carding, smurphing, shell accounts, and all those other things that were cool before MTV made specials about them.
The common factor of all that was IRC. There were plenty of gentlemens' agreements about things back then, such as IRC fights in which people would take channels (be a hostile force in assuming control over other's) and whatnot. I cannot claim to be even close to an expert, but in developing the negroid bot LaDarius, I learned a great deal about how IRC actually works. Somewhere, in some private IRC channel, Russian hackers are discussing how to influence the next American election, like that time they got Donald Trump elected. Such is the power of IRC, and it will never die.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:02AM
God damn are you ever stupid, boy!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @09:54PM (4 children)
Tried to make a Discord account over a VPN and they asked for a phone number. It's probably the same shit sandwich for Tor users.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)
It's proprietary, what did you expect?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @10:30PM
The proprietary of 10 years ago
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:15PM (1 child)
If your IP address or address prefix has had a history of abuse, and you have no phone or only a landline, this post on reddit [reddit.com] suggests contacting a human at support@ to arrange other means of verifying that you are human.
IRC is often little different depending on the server operator. You can't register on Freenode's NickServ through some privacy tools because of past abuse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:32PM
I did send a message at the time, politely, and got back some form of a "no". They may not have liked Proton Mail. I can't think of any other form of verification hoop that I would want to jump through. They already made their stance clear. They want to block or track bots and trolls, so privacy doesn't exist on Discord.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by richtopia on Saturday August 25 2018, @11:07PM (1 child)
Yes, everyone uses Discord or Slack or Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or {insert alternative here}. These services are convenient, but being hosted on central servers means they can die. IRC demonstrates the resilience of an open, self-hosted design. There may be alternatives with more features available, but until you want to migrate you can keep using your IRC server as-is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:55AM
Jabber. ( not Cisco's abomination, the real thing ).
Distributed. Supports everything IRC does and more.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday August 26 2018, @01:24AM (2 children)
About the same population that used IRC in the 90s are still using IRC. Each successive generation that joins the internet reinvents chat, forums, and sharing in successively worse ways.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:44AM
Can't wait for hybrid forum-VR Third Lyfe.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:19PM
Let me know when standard distributions of IRC server software have solved these through included plug-ins:
Or should every user of IRC be expected to lease his or her own VPS on which to run a logging bouncer and an attachment filedrop?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 26 2018, @02:45AM
"The Internet was a mistake."
- Vint Cerf
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]