freenode news

On Power to the People

root — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 20:15:00 +0000

At freenode, we're always protecting your privacy, freedom of speech and overall liberties. In continuation of the progress we've been making, I'm happy to announce we've taken a tremendous step forward toward true decentralization.

On Apple, Trojan Horses and Truth

root — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 13:10:00 +0000

In the story of the Garden of Eden, it is said that the forbidden fruit was encouraged to be eaten by the Devil. The story goes that eating the fruit was the direct action that resulted in man to be expelled from the garden.

Fast forward to 2021, Apple has now spent the past several years re-positioning itself as a privacy company. Much like the story of the Trojan Horse, which appeared to be a gift, Apple too appeared to be a truly trustable and hardlined privacy company. In the end, however, with the masses having migrated to Apple products, like Trojan Horses and Pandora's Boxes go, there's no turning back. Apple has scientifically proven and asserted that encrypted content scanning is absolutely possible - now it will be enforced. Some fruits really aren't meant to be eaten.

Although people get themselves caught like Hillary's admin in terms of the emails she allegedly illegally deleted and was not jailed for, someone can also plant evidence and determine your fate. We've seen planted evidence from the US government. Even though the FBI was the one making the posts, a little too coincidentally, the FBI suddenly labeled forums and conspiracy theorists as terrorists.

On Free Speech

root — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 00:52:00 +0000

The freenode digital territory stands for freedom, and that includes free speech.

The White House has begun working with facebook to actively direct the platform on which posts to censor. Further, it is working with top influencers to let them know what to say. In other words, the largest social media platform is under White House control and so are the top influencers on social media. The programming of people, or TV programming, has completed its shift to our internet.

While I will always maintain a perpetual friendship with the President of the United States, the current administration has deployed people with alleged questionable affiliations. According to the article, this person had affiliation with a trolling group, or false information spreading operation. She is a strong supporter of the group who tried to take down freenode and the real FOSS movement, as is joepie91, who helped spread the smear campaign against myself and freenode.

Introducing Remotes

root — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 21:50:00 +0000

Hello, World.

Since the beginning of the internet, IRC has provided a pipeline of communication leading to innovations that the world hadn't seen before. The internet was one thing as was e-mail, but it was the real time connectivity of IRC that finally shrank the world to one community. Many different kinds of people across borders formed groups across all kinds of different sectors which relied on, and benefitted from IRC and its ability to connect like minded passionate people, not just neighbors, together, be it FOSS, to translators, to whistleblowers, to you-name-it. IRC was the free world.

IRC continued, in a decentralized form, with powerful IRC clients, like BitchX and mIRC which both incorporated extensible scripting capabilities, and also, eggdrop bots that would stay online and provide the same programmable interface to IRC.

Introducing IRC.com by freenode

rasengan — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 16:33:00 +0000

1 score and a little over 2 years ago, IRC was created by the great and honorable Jarkko Oikarinen. It's had its ups and downs, from the era of net splits to the era of cancel culture. However, we're proud to announce that we've completely obliterated the swamp removing the shackles on progress, and now we're sailing blue seas. YaRR!

Now, we go onwards.

Taking IRC Further

rasengan — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

IRC was the beginning for many of us, and over the past few weeks, we've heard many great coming of age stories from so many of you. Many of us, including me, share the same.

IRC is our home and our root.

This is why it was surprising to find that IRC was in the same state that it was in the early 2000s. Today, I'm honored to announce that freenode has begun modernizing IRC.

freenode and FOSSHOST Partner to Empower FOSS

rasengan — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 10:00:00 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - United Kingdom

freenode, the world’s leading IRC network and home of the FOSS community, has entered into a partnership with FOSSHOST, the not-for-profit FOSS hosting provider empowering the backend for hundreds of FOSS projects empowering millions of people.

FOSSHOST will be providing infrastructure services including IRC nodes and will be working with freenode to provide infrastructure services to FOSS projects who make freenode their home as well as assisting with operations and the overall future.

Letter to freenode - Post Mortem of May 25, 2021

rasengan — Wed, 26 May 2021 21:00:00 +0000

Greetings freenode users,

As you are aware, over the last few weeks, we’ve been seeing an increasing amount of spam from other networks intending to mislead and influence long term running projects, namespaces and channels into moving to another new network which was formed parallel to freenode. While group contacts from the channels did not contact freenode staff directly, we were rather surprised when we received reports of unpleasant elements operating in the background and influencing these projects, namespaces and channels with false information in order to harm freenode’s administration and staff members’ images and paint a false narrative altogether.

In conjunction with yesterday’s events, in retrospect, we should have handled the action of closing down channels slightly differently. Originally, we posted a draft policy revision and solicited feedback in #freenode-policy-feedback. After several days, we discussed various feedback internally that was given.

freenode exists for FOSS

rasengan — Tue, 25 May 2021 14:00:00 +0000

To the FOSS Community,

Current global users: 68347

The current global user count of freenode exceeds the user count of the 2nd-6th largest networks, combined. I am pleased to announce, the plan to destroy freenode has failed!

On freenode and its commitment to FOSS

rasengan — Wed, 19 May 2021 20:00:00 +0000

Dear freenode,

First and foremost, I want to thank the hard working staff for keeping freenode running during these challenging times. Without you, this wouldn't be possible.

Changes to realnames of matrix.org bridged users

jess — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 20:00:00 +0000

matrix.org runs a bridge (matrix-appservice-irc) from their Matrix homeserver to freenode that allow Matrix users from any homeserver that federates with matrix.org to join channels on freenode and intermingle with the normal IRC userbase. These users have their Matrix User Id (username and homeserver, e.g. @jess:freenode.net) put in the realname field of their IRC connection.

Over time, the need to differentiate users by which homeserver they are using has arisen for multiple reasons, and we've worked with the matrix.org bridge operators to better format Matrix User Ids to suit the limited space provided by IRC realnames.

Realnames pose a slight problem for this usage; the maximum length for a Matrix User Id is 255 characters, whereas the maximum length for an IRC realname is 50 characters and things longer than that get truncated, which means if people have a Matrix username of 50 characters, it will truncate off the entirety of their homeserver.

Changes to ChanServ regarding cloaks

edk — Sat, 28 Nov 2020 17:00:00 +0000

freenode offers cloaks to our users, which replace one's hostname or IP address in various places with a project affiliation or lack thereof. Many of you will be aware that cloaks on freenode are not offered as a security measure and that various means are available to third parties to see through them.

However, many users acquire cloaks for security/privacy reasons anyway, and we've taken the decision to close some of the more glaring holes in the protection they offer. Please do note that cloaks are still not recommended for hiding a user's IP address.

We have deployed the following changes to ChanServ:

[Scheduled Maintenance] Services database spring cleaning

Fuchs — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 10:42:00 +0000

During the Easter weekend (April 12th to 15th) we will be purging the freenode services database. We periodically prune the database to remove expired accounts, nicknames and channels. Just like previous database purges we will be removing any accounts and nicknames that have not been used for 120 days at the time of the purge.

We appreciate that not everyone remembers to identify to services, and we would urge you to check and, if necessary, ensure that you identify so as to not lose your account/nickname(s) during the purge if you use any that may be approaching the expiration limit (120 days) used in connection with the services purge.

Please note that nicknames and accounts expire separately and you will need to identify to all grouped nicks that you wish to keep, and don’t forget to also check any second accounts you may have for bots or similar (for the sake of your fellow community members we would recommend cycling through any nicknames with a client that is not joined to channels so as to minimise disruption).

Private Internet Access and the freenode project

christel — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 18:50:20 +0000

This week we learned the news of the proposed merger between Private Internet Access (LTMI) and Kape Technologies.

freenode is not affected by this merger. Kape has indicated that it will honour Private Internet Access' server sponsorship for the next six months as a minimum, and we hope that the company will continue to support the project also after this time.

Nevertheless, the freenode project is fortunate to be in a position where it does not rely on a single sponsor and we have a broad and diverse range of supporters; and the freenode project will continue being part of and having access to support from the Imperial Family Companies (formerly London Trust Media Holdings (LTMH)).

Matrix GDPR access request data overshare

edk — Sun, 11 Aug 2019 18:52:00 +0000

Hi all,

You may already be aware that in the process of servicing a request for personal information under the GDPR, Matrix.org provided a user with a data dump that mistakenly included events that user had not been a party to. We suggest reading Matrix.org's writeup for more details.

On the morning of 2019-08-04 UTC we were notified by the recipient of the dump that the errant data included messages from freenode users and, in a spirit of transparency, felt it was important to keep you informed of any potential security issue concerning you.