Yes, I do. They discovered the murderer's profile and reached out to law enforcement with the details, including his chilling statement of intent. They could have silently deleted the profile and deflected criticism from themselves.
I am not aware of anything resembling 'archival links' other than screenshots of only the most recent posts, and verbal reports from others as to past posts.
One single page of vileness. No 'likes' to his posts, so not very popular. Notable is the anti-Trump sentiment. Not enough to confirm that this profile actually belonged to Robert Brower since names and profile pictures can be misappropriated.
Meanwhile, Gab was able to provide a complete profile of this individual and confirmation of his identity to the authorities.
Not just any service. For instance, Apple refused to assist the FBI in unlocking the iPhone belonging to one of the late prime suspects in the San Bernadino massacre. Wikileaks is refusing to co-operate with the CIA. Microsoft is resisting the FBIs demand to conduct so-called 'sneak and peek' searches on emails held on foreign servers.
Bowers also had profiles on Twitter and facebook which were probably just as nasty, but we are not hearing any calls to shut those services down.
> Not just any service. For instance, Apple refused to assist the FBI in unlocking the iPhone belonging to one of the late prime suspects in the San Bernadino massacre. Wikileaks is refusing to co-operate with the CIA. Microsoft is resisting the FBIs demand to conduct so-called 'sneak and peek' searches on emails held on foreign servers.
Oh, for crying out loud. These are absolutely apples and oranges. Apple refusing to unlock - wasn't about disclosing readily available data; in this case we're talking about public and payments data. Microsoft v US has been mooted by a change of the relevant laws. Wikileaks, wait, what?
> Bowers also had profiles on Twitter and facebook which were probably just as nasty, but we are not hearing any calls to shut those services down.
Yes. Their monitoring isn't great, but they do some. Not comparable.
>That ANY service is going to [provide the data on a suspect to law enforcement]?
Are the aforementioned not services?
>Apple refusing to unlock - wasn't about disclosing readily available data;
They refused to provide information required by the FBI to investigate an extremist attack. And there was data that was not readily available to the public in the Bowers' profile.
> Microsoft v US has been mooted by a change of the relevant laws
So what? It was still data that law enforcement wished to acquire in order to investigate criminal activity, in this case organized crime.
>Wikileaks, wait, what?
I am sure the authorities are very interested in who was responsible for leaking classified information. Something Wikileaks refuses to provide.
>Yes. Their monitoring isn't great, but they do some. Not comparable.
'Not comparable'? Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic rants are directly 'comparable' for one, and he is not alone. Twitter's 'monitors' appear to be more concerned with influencing elections than removing extremist content.
Also, try searching Youtube for 'six gorillion' or 'six million lies'. Reporting the content that is revealed appears to be completely ineffective. Again, such 'censorship' as is done is largely concerned with influencing elections.
Now teach the other hundreds of thousands of ex-IRC users how to set up their own bouncer servers and get them to actually stick with it for any amount of time.
Exactly. "Just use a good client that's always online" doesn't change the fact that almost everyone else on IRC goes offline when they shut their laptop or into a tunnel and you can't even send them a message while they're offline.
IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance.
People who suggest that IRC is the pinnacle of chat really seem out of touch to me. For example, look how every Twitch streamer and subreddit have a Discord and almost never an IRC channel.
> IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance.
I've been in, and now run, a channel for about twenty years that, at its peak, had about a hundred active users.
Most of those people were normal folks, from all walks of life, many of whom barely knew how to use a computer.
I would argue that it's only power users who want chat history in the first place. Normal people don't want to go back and read god-knows-how-many lines since they last logged in. They just want to chat.
Offline messaging is a valuable feature for everyone and can be improved by services, without needing a bouncer. Many networks have a "memoserv" that does this. Improve the UX of something like that (should be transparent, no different from a normal pm) and you have good offline messaging.
"I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance."
Then why argue for IRC to be updated with features? Why not go somewhere else and leave the cabal alone?
I'm of the pinnacle of chat crowd, and I will fully acknowledge the difficulty to someone that is not on the technical side. However, popularity does not determine quality. From a programmer (bot/client) creator, its perfect. The protocol is simple, light, and fast. For basic usage there is no confusing things, and even where I've had confusion (DCC), it turned out to be simple.
From the view of just a user, I still prefer IRC. The clients are lightweight, my Hexchat client is taking up 28mb of ram right now, and its one of bulkier ones. The lack of images allows compactness and simplicity.
Each member has the option to use the client of their choice (IRCCloud, their own bouncer, web client, desktop applications, etc.), each with varying cost, effort, and convenience. With Discord, everyone is locked into Discord.
P.S. You only need one IRCCloud sub for _all_ the channels + servers you want to lurk in.
Heyo, I'm the head of snoonet. LTM provides servers for us, with no asks or meddling.
Andrew is passionate about IRC and has been for a very long time. This is just another outflowing of his vision and gratitude, not some kind of cash grab.
Re: University: It's a 'University' ON IRC, not ABOUT IRC. There will be partnered educators and developers teaching classes about many topics, likely a good portion development focused.
Re: Ventures: This isn't ventures FOR IRC, it's an incubator. The communication, application, and interaction will be centered on IRC, but the ventures will be varied.
The team working on irc.com has extensive experience of IRC communities and networks and will be opening the door to collaborations with others within the IRC environments, whether network operators or ircd developers and seeks to work closely with the wider community on these endeavors.
I know most of the people involved personally, feel free to ask questions if you want!
Since you offered, I'll ask. What's the down low on IRCv3? Is it actually going to ever have any sort of impact? It feels like too little too late. Far too late to ever have support in most clients.
IRCCloud implements it but servers don't, and IRCCloud feels kind of dead development wise. And it doesn't really solve the problems that Discord solves, for example.
The dream of instant messaging being built on top of open protocols, just like email, doesn't feel terribly far out of reach but it also doesn't feel like we're making progress towards it and the efforts spent on keeping IRC alive feel, at least to me, kind of futile compared to say, efforts spent on Matrix.
I don't think it's crazy to leave IRC behind, and most people who mourn it will either do so out of nostalgia, or because of the loss of an open protocol. I'd rather centralize on something that has a future though.
Well, it is, but it's slow. IRCCloud and KiwiIRC both use it, and IRC.com will support it as well. There are some exciting new plans surrounding encrypted voice and video on the Kiwi side, for example.
>doesn't really solve the problems that Discord solves
What specifically? Hard to address that one without more granular discussion points.
>it also doesn't feel like we're making progress towards it
It could be argued that IRC.com is going to be a major step toward more rapid progress, between the foundation funding development, and the likelihood that it will be an enormous network that's V3 compatible.
I've heard that Twitch implements some of IRCv3 (or at least uses that format for some of their custom message attributes); however my impression the last time I gave just a glance at IRCv3 was more of a cautionary learning example.
My biggest issue with the protocol is that if I want to develop for an advanced data interchange protocol there shouldn't be any optional extras. Everything should be in the spec and required of real clients. (I can, however, envision a protocol in which 'relay servers' exist that don't need to fully understand a message to pass it's content.)
