One of the problems that efnext is trying to address, and a cause of network instability is DOS attacks against servers by little kiddies that want to take over channels.

So what they should do is fix those problems robustly. Instead they're using central control as a "fix". They get to decide what is abuse. They probably don't appreciate the kinds of problems that can arise from that (see my other comments about designer abuse and the implied risks of assuming editorial control that some ISPs have faced etc). It's typically easier to design hierarchical or even single central control systems than distributed systems. DoS resistance is hard too. The real solution to Distributed DoS is Distributed Service and they're headed in the wrong direction with that.

Not that I'm for or against the new network, but it seems that building a consensus and peer review of the protocols would be a good thing.

Indeed. They're probably relatively clue free also. (Just downloaded the tar ball to reverse engineer what they are actually doing).

As for the fear that this will lead to central control and monitoring of the IRC network, my guess is that IRC is already heavily monitored.

The problem is central control not monitoring -- monitoring affects privacy, central control affects free speech. (It's in clear text already, and they're not proposing to do anything about this -- and for the application -- public chat -- it's unclear how well you can protect privacy -- any narcs can just join in the discussion.)

It's a hell of a lot more trivial than Usenet with only 33 servers on the network, and each communication tagged with the hostname or IP address that originated it.

So the low number of servers is bad for protecting free speech also. Also on the plus side it's not that big a network to fork with a fork keeping the old protocols, with robust distributed DoS fixes. A corrolorary of Lucky's comment that there's more demand for crypto than people competent to do it -- there aren't enough crypto clueful people to keep up with internet protocols and steer them in sensible directions. Adam