All Your IRC Conversations Are Belong to Israel

[Ookii]

So there is this new Israeli startup IRSeeK.com which indexes conversations that happen on IRC channels, so far it has something like 300 million of them.  It's a pretty good idea, I can't even remember how many times I've turned to IRC for help with Linux, now I can just search (when google doesn't do the trick of course)!

You can also pull up some gems, particularly nice if you want to see what people are saying about you:

Sairon:  since you're in that particular genre, I'd take a good look at www.f13.net
 Sairon:  if you haven't been there already
 Sairon:  it's a community, a pretty special one
 JustinJoseph:  interesting
 Sairon:  there loads of MMO devs there and there's a lot of discussion about MMO design
 Sairon:  there's*
 Sairon:  but lurk around a bit before you post because they don't take lightly on outsiders hehe :)

That conversation was from 5/18/2007 on Freenode, channel 'Ogre3D'.

[schild]

vanity search

germans like the word 'schild'

[IainC]

That's ... miraculous. I wish I'd had that when I was running CS.

..and yes I succumbed to the temptation of a vanity search too - there were some hits but no-one was saying nasty things about me though :(

[Fordel]

Everything I found searching my name was written in Viking or Barbarian or something.

[Strazos]

Neg on vanity search. Zero.

I must be special or something.

[Tebonas]

Schild means shield in German. It would be hard to talk about role playing games or even road signs without using the word.

[cmlancas]

I don't think I've ever used the word shield to describe a road sign. Yellow, octagon, blue, green, and triangle all come to mind, but not shield. 

Is it a German thing? :)

[Trippy]

That doesn't look like a shield to you?

[Tebonas]

I guess it is. One German translation of road sign is Strassenschild

[cmlancas]

That doesn't look like a shield to you?

You know Trippy, in all the years I've been driving, I never knew what an interstate sign looked like. Thanks!

[Zetleft]

Service Suspension Update
December 2nd, 2007

Following the item posted on TechCrunch’s website, we have received hundreds of e-mails from people who support our activities and people whom are surprised and concerned about the privacy implications of our service.
As of 12:00 (UTC) IRSeek management decided to temporarily suspend all search options on IRSeek in order to find a satisfactory solution to the user’s concerns.

Looks like the site is shutdown for the time being.

[Sairon]

Hehe, kind of a cool project, even if it's a little creepy to know that you're getting logged. Ogre3d is an excellent, if not the best way to get into 3D game creation and 3D programming in general btw.

[Samwise]

Looks like the site is shutdown for the time being.

Heh, that's funny.  A long while back I wrote a similar indexing gizmo for an IRC channel that I frequented because I constantly found myself wanting to refer back to conversations, and in the end I had to take it down because there was the same sort of flap about privacy.  Kinda silly IMO because nothing you say in an open IRC channel with people lurking in it is anywhere near "private", but there it is.

[Merusk]

People on the internet have stupid ideas about privacy.  I'm sure a lot of the ones complaining were trying to hide something illicit or embarrassing, rather than expressing actual concern about 'privacy.'

"Oh crap, my husband IRSeek'd my screen name and found out I was slutting around with 4 other guys!"  (or women w/ their men as the case may be.  I have a specific person in mind, so I defaulted to female.)

[Mrbloodworth]

Service Suspension Update
December 2nd, 2007

Following the item posted on TechCrunch’s website, we have received hundreds of e-mails from people who support our activities and people whom are surprised and concerned about the privacy implications of our service.
As of 12:00 (UTC) IRSeek management decided to temporarily suspend all search options on IRSeek in order to find a satisfactory solution to the user’s concerns.

Open letter to IRC operators
December 2nd, 2007

Following contacts from several IRC operators, the following response E-mail has been sent to clarify IRSeek’s position:

–

In the past couple of days we’ve been contacted by many people, some supportive and appreciative, some surprised and concerned.

Due to the concerns of our users, we’ve decided that for the time being, until we figure out a satisfactory solution(s) to the user’s concerns, we have disabled the site.

Our bots have been designed to be non-intrusive and to only archive public channels, if we accidentally archived private or secret channels, it has been without our intent, and the content of these channels will be removed from our database. The purpose of IRSeek is to archive public chats that would be of interest to the entire Internet community.

Regarding awareness of the operators and users in the channels: we were under the impression that users in public chat-rooms are aware that their conversations are, by definition, public. Since people are allowed to go in and out of such channels, and anyone could be logging (and most likely automatically logging the conversations in their own IRC client) the channels, it will come as no surprise to users that their chats are available on the web. Also, we assume you are aware of the fact that IRSeek is not the first entity to place IRC logs on the web, and most likely not the last one to do it (ignoring the possibility that chat logs may be stored by others, and not made available to the entire community). We think that users/operators who believe that their discussions on public channels on IRC are private (except their IP, realname, fullname, nickname) are under a serious misconception, with-or-without IRSeek. With that, we read the responses of our users and realize that some are definitely concerned. Therefore, we are looking for ways to mitigate their concerns and find better ways to run our service.

It’s important to note that a lot of users contacted us and showed their support and appreciation of our service, and in many cases asked that we archive and index their channels.

At the present time, we are considering several approaches that have been suggested by users and by our advisers:

1. Do our best to anonymize the nicknames.
2. Allow channel operators to opt-out (by verifying their identity on IRC).
3. Make sure our bots only archive public channels that haven’t opted-out.
4. Make our bots detectable by nickname together with a link to our policies.
5. Better explain our policies on the website.
6. Do not index nicknames.

We would be happy to discuss this further with you and hear any suggestions you might have to making this service more acceptable to users and at the same time allowing users that are not familiar with IRC to learn about it and enjoy this wonderful knowledge base.

At the same time, we would seek the blessing of IRC operators in order to allow us to continue providing our service.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts about the matter.

Thanks,
Ariel and Eran.
B&C Advanced Solutions LTD.

Source


Sucks, i was going to look some stuff up =)

[Samwise]

Welcome to three posts ago.   

[Mrbloodworth]

Welcome to three posts ago.   

Thanks, glad i could finally make it.