On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Eric Cordian wrote:
Jim Choate writes:
So much for belief in free markets. You realise that there is nothing that requires servers to install this, or cease using the old network?
Note that the two things IRC really needs, end to end encryption and authentication, are not even on the list of "improvements" these people are working on.
I think that if you have authentication, what you wind up with is not really IRC-like. I would like to see pseudonymous authentication (ie, each nick would have a key for signing and be able to prove they were the same person who last had that nick) but if you just say "authentication" these powers are going to think in terms of keeping out anybody whose True Name they don't know. I can see crypto helping keep things between the clients and the servers with an asymmetric encryption scheme; somebody would provide the server's public key when logging on, the server would use their public keys to send them stuff, and nobody could suss out the network packets. Of course, people could still just run clients if they wanted to know what folk were saying, but with crypto they couldn't packetsniff to backtrack to the source very easily. (Jim Choate Quoting Adam J Herscher) ,So what are my
options at this point? Well, I can link to their network, or I can decide not to. If I decide not to, I will remain with a group of unwanted leaf servers with no hubs.
So the question becomes, how difficult is it for someone to set up an IRC hub? The answer is not very. I've got the software on my SuSE box -- I shut it down when I was starting to harden it, but when I first connected it to the net it was ready to function as an IRC host -- and if I'd typed the names of other IRC hosts into a config file it would cheerily have acted as an IRC hub. The old-style IRCies are going to need to set up a few new hubs, but I don't think this is going to kick them off the network entirely. It's just going to create a new IRC-like protocol and convert some existing IRC nodes to run it. The danger of course is that programmers are going to abandon "normal" IRC protocol. If they quit developing new software for IRC hosting and linking, or if the software for the new protocol is substantially easier to use and slicker, then people who make Linux distros are going to quit packaging old-style IRC hosts, people who keep download sites will take them down and put up "the new version", etc.
It would indeed be unfortunate if all controversial IRC traffic ended up being carried by isolated IRC servers, akin to remailers, whose admins were under constant attack, and which came and went on a daily basis.
Ugh. I think that's where this plan is pointing.
I anticipate that if Efnext pulls off this "Conform or be Delinked" exercise, people will be setting their sights on Usenet as the next thing that needs "fixing."
I anticipate that if IRC and/or Usenet are "fixed", then there will be a much stronger motive for people at large to create analogous protocols to IRC and NNTP with encryption and strong guarantees of privacy. But they're going to have to be pure peer-to-peer protocols, so there is no "server backbone" that concentrates power in a few coercable hands. Fortunately, I think the connectivity model is robust enough now -- it wasn't, back when NNTP was created -- to go fully peer-to-peer on netnews transfer. Hmmm. There may even be a niche in this new ecology for a network standards body composed completely of pseudonymous individuals, to help create and standardize network protocols for the underside of the net. Bear