
Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down - highspeedmobile
https://echelog.com
======
jtakkala
A long time ago parsing Echelog logs was how I was able to monitor the IRC
activity of an attacker at a company I used to work at. I didn't normally sit
on these channels myself, but Echelog enabled me to look back and collect data
on the various handles that this person operated under.

There were 20-something handles they used over approximately a 6 month period
of monitoring. I was always able to find a small piece of information to
correlate these handles together. Sometimes it started with a hunch, such as
the language (even slang) they would use, but eventually they'd slip up in
some way and we'd have a pretty irrefutable link to the person.

This information helped us develop a motive behind the hack and the ongoing
public info was then fed to national crime agencies. My employer never went
through with prosecution, but as this person was of much interest behind other
hacks they were eventually prosecuted and convicted. I always wondered if my
occasional Echelog intelligence reports ever had a role in that conviction.

~~~
unixhero
For the record, careful with doing private investigations. It might look good
on Netflix, but can turn sour real fast.

~~~
cutemonster
What can happen?

~~~
saagarjha
There's probably a chance of you being retaliated against or going to jail
yourself, depending on how you're doing the snooping.

~~~
jtakkala
Indeed, and in that respect Echelog was a great source of OSINT material for
the anecdote I described above. That, along with `whois` data and other public
databases can reveal a lot without putting oneself at legal risk.

------
jdsully
I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating
loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in
google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.

~~~
Geeflow
I would have shared the same sentiment.

I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active on IRC. Are
loggers a more recent (as in this millenium) development?

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I would say chat history and asymmetrical scheduling for chat are expectations
in this day and age, and the lack of them is one of the biggest reasons people
find IRC irritating or difficult. (I ask a question, and if the person fit to
answer it isn't logged in right now, it never gets even responded to.)

Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack, etc. allows you to
see messages while you were offline. Compared to things from the older eras of
messaging like AIM and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone
unless they were online as well.

So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a relatively more modern
element: They're filling in a gap IRC has with modern chat clients.

~~~
yborg
ZNC and earlier implementations have been around for 15+ years to provide
queuing proxies. Pretty much all of the "unique" features found in current
chat systems were also implemented in one fashion or another in the IRC
ecosystem decades ago. Ease of use has definitely improved, in exchange for
for-profit company control over communications in these systems. IRC's
decentralized nature still argues for its relevance even now.

~~~
kipari
IRC is not really decentralised, is it? Or are you arguing that it’s
decentralised in the sense that each user can implement and control some
features like logging?

------
rasengan
I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is
definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of
amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC
Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to
tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other
networks [10].

IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications
across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present
the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual
[13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!

IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot
[17] and supybot [18] among others.

You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc
[20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24].

[1] [https://freenode.net](https://freenode.net)

[2] [https://oftc.net](https://oftc.net)

[3] [https://rizon.net](https://rizon.net)

[4] [https://www.dal.net](https://www.dal.net)

[5] [https://tildeverse.org](https://tildeverse.org)

[6] [https://snoonet.org/](https://snoonet.org/)

[7] [https://quakenet.org/](https://quakenet.org/)

[8] [https://efnet.org](https://efnet.org)

[9] [https://ircnet.com](https://ircnet.com)

[10]
[https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php](https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php)

[11] [https://weechat.org/](https://weechat.org/)

[12] [https://kiwiirc.com](https://kiwiirc.com)

[13] [https://codeux.com/textual](https://codeux.com/textual)

[14] [https://palaverapp.com/](https://palaverapp.com/)

[15] [https://mirc.com/](https://mirc.com/)

[16] [https://adiirc.com/](https://adiirc.com/)

[17] [https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot](https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot)

[18] [https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot](https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot)

[19] [https://kiwiirc.com/](https://kiwiirc.com/)

[20] [https://znc.in](https://znc.in)

[21] [https://irccloud.com/](https://irccloud.com/)

[22] [https://quassel-irc.org/](https://quassel-irc.org/)

[23] [https://www.bitlbee.org/](https://www.bitlbee.org/)

[24]
[https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc](https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc)

Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left
anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and...
alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and
implementations out there!

~~~
airstrike
If only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone out there is
willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you coffee so I can switch over
from irssi

mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days

~~~
Geeflow
My first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now
and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still
being used... 20 years after the last release.

~~~
hkt
Mine were mIRC scripts for banning spammers. Eventually we had a community of
people writing bots in perl, PHP, and loads of other languages. I was
introduced to Unix by means of wanting to run irssi in screen so I could
collect messages even when I was offkyine. It is no exaggeration to say IRC is
completely responsible for my career, far more so than education!

------
ocdtrekkie
This is sad because BotBot.me shut down not that long ago too.

We are pretty reliant on Whitequark's logger at the moment.
[https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/](https://freenode.irclog.whitequark.org/)

------
myu701
So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make
it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a
deal this is?

On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is
shutting down, where does this lie?

IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.

~~~
ryanong
IRC was the chat server. Freenode was THE OSS irc chat server.

There wasn't any other game in town that could scale well enough that was
free.

~~~
abstractbeliefs
Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a
couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3
months?

~~~
hombre_fatal
I think this would be useful: how many unique users have sent at least one
message in the last 24 hours?

I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like
#javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user
list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day.

There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on
three javascript-related webdev Discord servers that that each have at least
100 unique users interacting daily.

I have to wonder if 90% of people connected to IRC are just echoes in the
system, autoreconnecting from old hardware long after their owners have moved
on.

In these threads people always say "nah, IRC is doing great!" But frankly I
don't think people realize how much IRC communities have shrunk. Its lunch has
been eaten and it feels like the only people still around on IRC are aging
people who once used it in its prime.

~~~
dhodell
Many IRC communities have shrunk. Different reasons. Things like Discord and
mumble, combined with more collaboration and multiplayer competition in games
took gamers away from IRC and crippled networks like Gamesurge.

Social media, especially things like Twitter and the various short video
sharing services took away the "general chat" demographic -- partially because
folks who were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel closer, and
folks who are not tend to be younger, and the younger demographic trends
towards newer technologies.

Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as you point out this
isn't always the case. I would argue that freenode is probably safe from too
much decline for a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once
used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit harsh :)) also tend to
be people with a lot of experience in $technical_topic. If you want to ask
questions about $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on IRC,
that's where you go.

You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is not on IRC. Javascript
is a relatively new technology (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer,
and Elm newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability to run native
applications written in JS has caused that community to surge. It's also
relatively easier to get into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So
you attract more people, and you're going to attract younger people, and
you're going to have a really diverse audience for a wide range of topics. All
of a sudden a single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense
anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem like fun, so you
decide to use Discord or Slack. I think this makes a lot of sense for lots of
communities.

For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical communities, IRC is
still a good solution. It's not fair to say that "its lunch has been eaten"
\-- it'll remain relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most
accessible way to communicate. But there are other, different solutions for
similar problems that do a better job of catering to specific audiences. And
that's just fine.

Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts from server stats,
which are mostly aggregates. So I can't answer that question. But Freenode's a
rather active network.

------
eloahx
I have an irc server, no rules, nothing illegal though. we have fun!
irc.t60group.org +6697 #kotu

------
perlgeek
I also ran a public IRC logger (mostly in and around the perl/raku
communities, but also other channels).

Simplify figuring out if IRC logs fall under GDPR was nearly impossible to me,
so I shut down some time ago. (It might have violated earlier privacy
regulations as well, hard to tell).

Lots of people offered their opinion on that topic, but when it goes to court,
none of those opinions matter. Hiring my own lawyer seemed too expensive, and
nobody who asked me to continue running it offered to pay for a lawyer either.
Tough luck.

~~~
kirstenbirgit
what do you imagine would have happened if you kept it running?

~~~
perlgeek
There's a 80% chance that nothing would have happened, a 15% chance that
people would complain about the privacy implications but won't do anything
about it, and a 5% chance that somebody takes action and I get some sort of
legal citation/penalty/whatever.

All percentages estimations only, of course :-)

------
infogulch
I wonder if archive.org would be interested...

~~~
toomuchtodo
Already pushed WARC files into the Archive for Wayback ingestion.

------
hkt
Honestly, it is sad but I grew up on IRC. Time to put all those ill advised
remarks to bed..

------
kgraves
Can I use this on my iPhone? I haven't been able to find easy to use ones.

~~~
uniquelygeneric
I prefer Igloo IRC, but finding a server and chatroom is an exercise you'll
have to do on your own depending on what you are looking for. I would start
with Freenode if you don't know where to begin.

~~~
mwest
The screenshots for Igloo look nice, but the developer responses to reviews
are... entertaining, and concerning.

~~~
eloahx
yeah he's legit crazy

------
snvzz
Good riddance. I like irc more when I don't have to measure every word I say
because some douchebag is silently logging everything and putting it in a
website for everybody to see, index and archive, without my permission or
anybody else's.

------
superkuh
Sad to see GDPR still slowly killing anything too small to pay a legal team
(basically anything that can be sued that hasn't incorporated, ie, human
persons).

> Furthermore, the cost (financially, mentally and legally (GDPR)) of running
> the site, no longer makes sense for me.

------
andarleen
I am surprised that privacy aware companies are not using IRC more for their
intra company chat, and that none invested in a webcam voice chat client for
IRC. Even the most basic server can handle thousands of clients.

~~~
hkt
I recall working at companies where the ops or DevOps teams would run their
own IRC servers pre-slack. It was basically the only way to get stuff done if
you had a desktop PC and needed to work closely with anyone. The problem is
that most companies don't know how to do due diligence on a tool like IRC and
the clients aren't very friendly. The lack of commercialisation of the space
is what prevented companies from paying for it, and that meant no easy and
rich clients got built, which meant it never got commercialised, etc etc..

