[Update: Hostile takeover of Gentoo, others] Freenode Staff quit en-masse after secret ownership changes

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, RicenShine said:

@suicidalfranco
@Mark Kaine

 While there is a certain charm to text only systems, IRC's biggest pains was logging in, saving stuff, catching up later. It honestly feels like one of the worst accessibility nightmare. With everything being command line and there is no indication on how to sign up, how to login, how to change nick(all of which the client maker could have implemented but none did), it's simply unusable at it's current stage

Ya, Im not saying we should go back to that, just specifc about "emojis" they seem indeed to be made for a group of people who dont understand them (and dont use them therefore)

Only thing where it really works is "discord" (probably also because people can easily make their own) and that yet again is an extremely volatile platform, have you ever tried to look something up thats a couple of months old? Oof…

Its possible, but its a pain and idk how far back it really goes.

 

Thats also the charm of early chat forms, once you close it, its gone… people behave different if they know that, its kinda weird (but often preferable imo)

 

 

 

 

[TigerHawk]

This whole thread is giving me a serious "What year is it?" Vibe. I was pretty big into IRC at the turn of the millenium but around 2004 or so I left and never want back. I even worked at a few servers for awhile. I remember everyone and their grandma using that Invision script I think it was to customize their mIRC client. Nerds brandishing their e-peen with the PC spec reporting script to see who had the most ram. XDCC bots were the place for people to pirate movies and music. I remember getting a full 5kbps one time on my dialup connection.

 

What year is it?

[Sauron]

On 5/20/2021 at 9:24 PM, suicidalfranco said:

Much better imo.

Can we go back to that? Specially the no emoji, no stickers part

no

[suicidalfranco]

17 minutes ago, Sauron said:

no

disgusting -_-

[staticpage]

On 5/20/2021 at 9:45 AM, Spindel said:

I’m to young to have used one but I have seen those old modems where you put the phone in IRL..

It not a modem per-say, it's an Acoustic coupler and my dad's craftsman lawnmower would over power the acoustic dampener box and I would lose like half my speed.

[Fnige]

13 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

disgusting -_-

succumb to the emojis 

[roanialdessatete]

Even better, Andrew Lee is also the founder of Shells (which is a new LTT sponsor), which supposedly provides secure cloud-based desktop PC services, and the CTO of Shells is Mike “Let Mt. Gox get looted and then tried to cover it up” Karpelès. More on Ars Technica.

 

On 5/20/2021 at 4:34 AM, igsilya said:

It's, probably, worth mentioning that the Freenode was taken over by founder of Private Internet Access. 

 

For me as an open source software engineer who uses Freenode almost every day and has public weekly meetings there, the overall situation is scary.  I'm not sure what is actually happened, but all this is very unhealthy at the very least.  Just sent out an email to discuss moving of the primary channel to Libera.Chat.  And we seems to be migrating starting from tomorrow.

 

Some projects already migrated, some are in the middle of discussion.  Some links to resignation statements and moving announcements:

https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_461
https://blog.centos.org/2021/05/centos-irc-channels-moving-to-irc-libera-chat/
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-05-19-liberachat/
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2021q2/006888.html

 

[faketruth]

14 hours ago, roanialdessatete said:

Even better, Andrew Lee is also the founder of Shells (which is a new LTT sponsor), which supposedly provides secure cloud-based desktop PC services, and the CTO of Shells is Mike “Let Mt. Gox get looted and then tried to cover it up” Karpelès. More on Ars Technica.

 

 

i HIGHLY doubt ltt will ever address this, even on the RING sponsorship back then they are just gone super silent without even answering my question to them here or on the reddit. /shrug

 

plus at this point - with them not addressing ring back then - ive already considered that ltt will accept any kind of sponsorship anyway no matter what, since they need to pay for their staff :)

[rcmaehl]

11 hours ago, faketruth said:

i HIGHLY doubt ltt will ever address this, even on the RING sponsorship back then they are just gone super silent without even answering my question to them here or on the reddit. /shrug

 

plus at this point - with them not addressing ring back then - ive already considered that ltt will accept any kind of sponsorship anyway no matter what, since they need to pay for their staff

If the forums have a riot over it they'll address it, but the entire LTT fanbase will be looped in. Just like last time a company got bought out/was shady.

[JockeTF]

This LTT sponsor also just took control over a gaming-related channel I've been an admin of for 14 years, along with more than 700 other channels. The channel was renamed, a redirect replaced the old name, and all admins lost their privileges to the renamed channel. Any channel mentioning Libera in their topics have been taken over. Good thing the community moved even before I knew what was happening.

Edited May 26, 2021 by JockeTF
Better formatting and minor correction.

[faketruth]

7 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

If the forums have a riot over it they'll address it, but the entire LTT fanbase will be looped in. Just like last time a company got bought out/was shady.

yep, if there is a riot, but i doubt majority of llt fan will ever bother with this anyway, just like how is it with RING back then. in other word, they will never address it.

 

just saw linus looking for details on.. twitter, so they are probably gonna at least talk about it? dunno lol

Edited May 26, 2021 by faketruth
added twitter details

[igsilya]

2 hours ago, JockeTF said:

This LTT sponsor also just took control over a gaming-related channel I've been an admin of for 14 years, along with more than 700 other channels. The channel was renamed, a redirect replaced the old name, and all admins lost their privileges to the renamed channel. Any channel mentioning Libera in their topics have been taken over. Good thing the community moved even before I knew what was happening.

I can confirm this.  Our channel was taken over today.

 

On 5/23/2021 at 10:03 PM, TigerHawk said:

This whole thread is giving me a serious "What year is it?" Vibe. I was pretty big into IRC at the turn of the millenium but around 2004 or so I left and never want back. I even worked at a few servers for awhile. I remember everyone and their grandma using that Invision script I think it was to customize their mIRC client. Nerds brandishing their e-peen with the PC spec reporting script to see who had the most ram. XDCC bots were the place for people to pirate movies and music. I remember getting a full 5kbps one time on my dialup connection.

 

What year is it?

Well, maybe majority of people are not using IRC today, but it's a pretty big thing for open-source software communities.  Users are asking for guidance, developers are asking questions to maintainers and discussing ways to fix some bugs.  We have weekly meetings on IRC to communicate and keep in sync with developers from different companies all over the world.  One big advantage of IRC is wide availability of open-source clients including command line clients as not everyone likes to run blobs on their systems or likes to use extensive graphic interfaces.  XMPP for some reason is not that popular in FOSS communities, but it's not a modern thing either.  Matrix gets some traction for a last couple of years, but it's not that common now as IRC.

[HarryNyquist]

40 minutes ago, igsilya said:

XMPP for some reason is not that popular in FOSS communities

XMPP is incredibly complex to set up properly. IRC requires starting a daemon or two and you're basically good to go.

 

EDIT: just saw this official statement from Gentoo 

Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked – Gentoo Linux

 

And this from GrapheneOS 

GrapheneOS on Twitter: "Freenode admins hijacked the #grapheneos and #grapheneos-offtopic channels due to us migrating to Matrix rooms: https://t.co/6FQGghonyx They removed our channel moderation privileges, changed the topic and set the channel to invite-only preventing users from joining/rejoining. https://t.co/bwj930TICX" / Twitter

[CerealExperimentsLain]

So, what's the end game here?  I'm not questioning if this is happening I'm just puzzled as to why.  Can FreeNode be used a profit generator somehow?  Even if they take over channels, while it'll def harm communities, they'll migrate to other servers or even set up their own possibly.  So what's the assumed goal?

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, CerealExperimentsLain said:

So, what's the end game here?  I'm not questioning if this is happening I'm just puzzled as to why.  Can FreeNode be used a profit generator somehow?  Even if they take over channels, while it'll def harm communities, they'll migrate to other servers or even set up their own possibly.  So what's the assumed goal?

Good question … how many active users des IRC / freenode have approximately? That would maybe give us a hint…  

 

PS: and who actually took over aka "hostile entity"? 

[HarryNyquist]

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

PS: and who actually took over aka "hostile entity"? 

Andrew Lee, the founder of Private Internet Access.

The articles are rather sparse on info, likely reflecting the lack of info we have overall. The speculation is that he slowly seized more and more power over Freenode Limited (their holding corp) until he took full control recently.

[rcmaehl]

@GabenJr Any chance we can get your opinion on this?

[nullrequest]

Another quick update. Rasengan aka Andrew Lee has made a blatantly transphobic person a mod/oper

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1397775379549458433?s=19

 

[Master Disaster]

On 5/20/2021 at 3:41 PM, StDragon said:

No, not that old, and I'm not sure about the whole military exclusive thing (at least in America).

ARPANET was created by ARPA which was a department of the US DoD and until the late 70s was used mostly by the military (though I believe not exclusively). In the very early 80s the National Science Foundation funded a project to expand the network to scientific institutes which was when it really went full public access.

 

ARPANET established many of the networking fundamentals we still use today including FTP, Email, TCP/IP, packet switching and without it we wouldn't have the modern internet at all.

[StDragon]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

ARPANET was created by ARPA which was a department of the US DoD and until the late 70s was used mostly by the military (though I believe not exclusively). In the very early 80s the National Science Foundation funded a project to expand the network to scientific institutes which was when it really went full public access.

 

ARPANET established many of the networking fundamentals we still use today including FTP, Email, TCP/IP, packet switching and without it we wouldn't have the modern internet at all.

I was responding to what @WolframaticAlpha Said "You're too old to know of a time when modems were only sold by att to the military, amirite?

That is to say, at least in the US you could purchase a 2400 baud modem to dial into a privately run BBS. At that time, TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, and NetBEUI weren't even used in the session. In fact, file transfer was via XMODEM, YMODEM, and ZMODEM.

[Master Disaster]

40 minutes ago, StDragon said:

I was responding to what @WolframaticAlpha Said "You're too old to know of a time when modems were only sold by att to the military, amirite?

That is to say, at least in the US you could purchase a 2400 baud modem to dial into a privately run BBS. At that time, TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, and NetBEUI weren't even used in the session. In fact, file transfer was via XMODEM, YMODEM, and ZMODEM.

Oh I'm aware, heck remember the movie War Games from the early 80s? BBS was around in the 70s and you could get those weird modems where you plug the handset of the phone on top of the thing and dial the number yourself, unfortunately here in the UK we're a bunch of luddites and AFAIK there was nothing going on here until the late 80s/early 90s. I remember the year I first got internet access was 1995 (it might have been early 96) and we had it pretty early by UK standards as my Mum was a college tutor and needed to be able to dial in to her work account from home.

[StDragon]

2 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Oh I'm aware, heck remember the movie War Games from the early 80s? BBS was around in the 70s and you could get those weird modems where you plug the handset of the phone on top of the thing and dial the number yourself, unfortunately here in the UK we're a bunch of luddites and AFAIK there was nothing going on here until the late 80s/early 90s. I remember the year I first got internet access was 1995 (it might have been early 96) and we had it pretty early by UK standards as my Mum was a college tutor and needed to be able to dial in to her work account from home.

Back before the Internet (TCP/IP) as we know it with HTML via Windows 95, there was Prodigy and CompuServe. AOL was its own thing, but it ran on Win95 and had gateway access to the broader internet, but really served up inTRAnet content. Microsoft's MSN was a direct competitor to AOL, but wasn't nearly as content rich despite first attempting to bake it into the OS. 

 

But prior to that 90's era,  the dial-up terminal BBS was extremely popular with Atomic Cafe having a huge following in Houston, TX. Some BBS access you had to pay a subscription for, but the vast majority were independently ran on people's 286 and newer at home. But it was kept local because anything else would incur long distant phone charges; and the parents wouldn't be too happy about that bill. Unfortunately those only had one phone line dedicated to them, so only one user at a time could connect.  But we could leave messages with other members or directly with the sysop. Then there was MUD games and warez including upload/download quotas.

[CarlBar]

Add me to a list of very confused forum members. The OP feels like a mess, (not a stab at the OP it's the available info that seems to be causing this). Apparently a holding company that owns the service has come in and started changing things without informing anyone and apparently bypassing the owner of the company. How exactly both from a security standpoint and an ownership standpoint did this happen. Good security should have required someone to go through the existing employee's to do this, and how did they go through the existing owner to get control of the holding company without his knowledge.

 

Then there's the question of terms of service and terms of employment. I suspect the employees are in the US and so are out of luck, but just taking over like that, especially when dealing with a huge amount of data is on very shaky ground, (GDPR alone would eat them alive).

 

 

[rcmaehl]

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

How exactly both from a security standpoint and an ownership standpoint did this happen.

Legal Strong arming and hidden agreements. 

 

Quote

To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much that we can do about it without some of us risking financial ruin.

PIA and Andrew Lee are worth multiple millions, while freenode is mostly ran by volunteers and paid by donations.

[CarlBar]

So basically they stole the network and the actual owners don't have the fund to fight it?