Anarchy Eroded: Project Efnext

[Andrew Alston]

I must admit Im rather sad to see efnet going this route, having been on
efnet for years and participated and become and active member of many of the
more underground channels on the network, I find it sad to see that the only
irc network where anarchy truely ruled has come to this.

I can however see their reasoning, having looked at efnext, I notice you can
no longer do certain things, /links doesnt work, which means the hubs are
hidden, and splits cant be seen, this means far less smurfing, because there
is no point to smurfing  a leaf server.

You also cannot see the servers someone is linked to if you /whois them,
this stops a number of denial of service attacks.

As for IRC Operators getting involved in channel affairs, if this happens,
people WILL run to another network, maybe I live under an illusion, but I
believe that the anarchy on networks like efnet is inbred in the people, and
is not so much about the network where the people reside, but the people
themselves, and if the anarchy and the control of their own channels is
taken from them, the people will get up and move somewhere where they still
have control.  Their is NOTHING forcing people to move to efnext, and
speaking from experience, setting up and running irc servers is easy, lets
face it, with a decent *nix system you can have an ircd up and running in a
matter of 5 or 10 minutes, an entire network is no more than an hour if you
are linking 10 systems.

Further more, IRC does NOT take that much bandwidth, there is a myth that
efnet NEEDS OC3 links etc because of the traffic that is passed across it,
what people dont say is that the servers actually only run at between 1 and
2 megabit/second if you remove the traffic from DDOS and attacks like smurf.

As for myself, I will still be on efnet, but other than that I will retire
to blabbernet, sure there are services there, and sure its small, but its
non-censored, anarchial, anything goes, and people dont tell me what to do.

Btw, another point I forgot to mention, there is encrypted IRC out there,
there are encrypted protocols built into scrollz for public channel, dcc,
and private message.  If anyone wants more information contact me, I might
also try and release a patch for bitchx and ircII to do the same thing if I
get the time to do some coding and can figure out the crypto code (I dont do
much crypto code unfortunatly)

Anyway, the above are just my opinions.

Andrew Alston / Vortexia
irc.blabber.net - Server Administrator


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cypherpunks at minder.net
[mailto:owner-cypherpunks at minder.net]On Behalf Of Bill Stewart
Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 9:00 AM
To: cypherpunks at cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Anarchy Eroded: Project Efnext


At 02:52 AM 12/31/00 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
>Something I don't see much of on the efxnet page - "why?"
>
>This is in the FAQ:
>"EFNext is the name of a project geared towards making IRC a more stable,
>    uniform, chat environment."
>
>and they say "introductory document coming soon." I still don't know why
>this is happening (I don't hang out on EFnet). What do the efxnet people
>give as their reasons for a new IRC network?

Simplification of protocols so they can sell out to Microsoft/AOL?  :-)


				Thanks!
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639