Solved What's the prospect of FreeBSD IRC Surviving?

What's funny is that you can gracefully degrade emojis, reactions, images, avatars, etc into IRC without it turning into MS Comic Chat but still "no." Even for things that aren't GUI oriented: No UTF8, no ZNC standardization, no more secure authentication schemes, no impossible-to-takeover-via-netsplit channels. Just "no."
I think you just gotta vet your IRC client for those kinds of things. Sure, for stuff like UTF-8 and fonts, you can let your local Konsole take care of that, for authentication - there's OpenSSL, and server-side - If you wanna run your own, RTFM and pay attention to the security. Once all that gets properly set up and compliant with modern security standards - there should be no issues banging away at the keyboard like in the 'good old days' - things will look and work pretty much the same.

These days, old-style IRC is just cannon fodder for network security training - just take a look at TrihexagonaL's post a little earlier in the thread for your ammo.
 
I think you just gotta vet your IRC client for those kinds of things. Sure, for stuff like UTF-8 […]
Uhm: It's indeed a shortcoming of IRC (as a protocol) that it doesn't support encodings of any kind. It will just pass on "octets".

But nowadays, this typically isn't a problem any more, because most just agree that UTF-8 is used. When all the clients use UTF-8, and the IRC server just passes on octets between them, everything works fine.
 
Uhm: It's indeed a shortcoming of IRC (as a protocol)
I think that IRC should be treated as a service rather than as a protocol. Back in the early days of Internet, passing straight octets was 'good enough', because it worked. All we needed were rules for creating octets on one end, and processing them on the other. That's why IRC was a protocol. Times have changed, so have rules of the game.
 
I think that IRC should be treated as a service rather than as a protocol. Back in the early days of Internet, passing straight octets was 'good enough', because it worked. All we needed were rules for creating octets on one end, and processing them on the other. That's why IRC was a protocol. Times have changed, so have rules of the game.
Well, as soon as US-ASCII (7bit) wasn't a universal standard any more, charset (conversion) support was important. Email added it, Usenet added it, of course HTTP (browsers) as well.

IRC never did.

It's not really important any more nowadays because most agree that UTF-8 is the new US-ASCII ;)
 
"These days, old-style IRC is just cannon fodder for network security training - just take a look at TrihexagonaL's post a little earlier in the thread for your ammo."

I post that kind of thing for people who aren't aware of what goes on in hopes they will become more security conscious.

We had ready available proxy lists of machines with open ports from around the world. We all knew who they resolved back to and TCP ports 25, 80, 3128, 8000, 8080 were fair game no matter who they belonged to or what country they were in.

A far as I was concerned anyway and that was the general consensus among Agents of Chaos. The Country they were in more important to me than who owned them was a concern. I could look like I was in Turkey and in an instant be someone else from the US in the same place.

And you could chain proxy's through your browser address bar with the right syntax with no proxy software installed.

I haven't tried it in years and don't know if they fixed that somehow since then. I just googled it and it says you can't do it, but I have done it many times and learned it from people who did.
 
I prefer irssi to weechat, but I've not been able to get it work with slack, which is what the company uses. I can get weechat working with slack, so I don't have another web page or its apparently resource hungry (so I've read, haven't used it) client.
I've gotten used to weechat now, and it is nice. Not too hard to make the transition between the two, IMHO.
 
  • Thanks
Reactions: a6h
Why not use Matrix? Seems like a nice way to communicate with everyone sharing the burden of hosting. No more single point of failure thanks to federation and everyone can choose the client they see fit (unless encryption is used which is currently limited to riot/element clients as others lack implementation). Its fully open source and there are working reference implementations of the protocol available. Everyone can make an account for matrix on the official matrix.org server and use element.io as a web-based entry point. If you want, set up your own server and join the network, host the element client yourself or get one of many desktop programs.
I sound like a sales rep. Godda love that.
 
Meaning moving over to discord? I'm not too fond of them. They have the type of monopoly which I do not want to support. Also putting your communication at the whim of one private company sounds like the modern day internet which I am escaping from partly with FreeBSD. If that's what the people want sure ...
 
I suppose I can't be too religious on backend servers. Basically I will use anything that supports a standard IRC client. If that is slack, discord, matrix, hipster-chat, whatever. And when they die, I will point my client to the next without changing any real workflow.

If something fails to provide support for a standard client, then... well perhaps they might mature one day and I will give them another shot.

As far as I am concerned IRC as a server might be "limited" but the IRC client is much more powerful. If a chat server doesn't support it and instead enforces only their web client, then they are likely being nefarious and creepy and I won't engage with them (perhaps without some unofficial public bridge service anyway).
 
irc/bitlbee helped with some of these stupid services in the past. But didn't use it for a long time. I have zero interest in other "chat systems", IRC is the only relevant thing.

As many channels moved from freenode to libera, I now followed. I just hope I won't have to reconnect to freenode as well. The fragmentation is what's really bothering me.
 
On the bright side, there is this strange idea that seems to have emerged that IRC is only still around for legacy reasons and saying that "Oh, now that people need to move from freenode anyway, they will finally "upgrade" to a modern system like discord".

I think once these kinds of (inexperienced?) people see that IRC will still infact stick around, they might re-evaluate why IRC is a common choice and that perhaps they need to learn more about it.

So if anything, it *might* bring more popularity to IRC? Maybe... lets hope!
 
Wasn't meant as criticism against weechat ;) If anyone wants a web interface, fine for me as well, it's just the one thing I personally don't want. Maybe I'll have a look at weechat some day anyways (for exploring the other possibilities), but so far, I'm very happy with good old irc/irssi ;)
Weechat is fine after some customizations, the defaults for me is quite clunky.
 
As many channels moved from freenode to libera, I now followed. I just hope I won't have to reconnect to freenode as well. The fragmentation is what's really bothering me.
Is there some issue with connecting to more than one ircd of which I've been unaware for years? It's not uncommon that my client is connected to several.
 
Not that I know of. I suspect (without claiming to be able to read their mind), that the comment just referred to having to keep track of various channels on different servers, which can definitely become a nuisance.
 
Is there some issue with connecting to more than one ircd of which I've been unaware for years?
Not a technical one. Well, of course, each connection will allocate resources (a local socket and some bandwith), but with IRC, that's indeed negligible.

I just don't like it more generally. IRC started as one large decentralized network, you connect to one server of this large network and get access to all the channels. Well, that's long ago. Until recently, there were at least "only" two networks specifically targeted at providing channels for opensource projects and communities. Now, there are three of them. I'd prefer one definitive place ;)

scottro showed pretty acceptable mind-reading skills… :cool:
 
Back
Top