Data Mining Concerns IRC Community

Found on Slashdot on Saturday, 01 December 2007
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Two days ago an article on TechCrunch about IRSeeK revealed to the community that a service logs conversations of public IRC channels and put them into a public searchable database. What is especially shocking for the community is that the logging bots are very hard to identify. They have human-like nicks, connect via anonymous Tor nodes and authenticate as mIRC clients. IRSeeK never asked for permission and violates the privacy terms of networks and users.

As a result, Freenode, the largest FOSS IRC network in existence, immediately banned all tor connections while the community gathered and set up a public wiki page to share knowledge and news about IRSeeK. The demands are clear: remove all existing logs and stop covert operations in our channels and networks.

Now it would be surprising if there was no legal way to stop them. Using TOR is essential for quite a few users who want to avoid problems in their home-countries (like eg China). Plus, secretly harvesting without consent is pretty questionable. The chats might even be covered by copyrights.