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Fjord artisan
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http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=na...RC+log+freenode

Freenode is one of the many "quality" networks of IRC, mainly a place for the geekish. Some channels are leaving bots in a channel 24/7 in order to completely log public IRC communitcation.

You can prefix your lines with [nolog] type commands, or fill out meaningful data about URLs or subjects mentioned.

I think its nifty - but how about the rest of you?

It's got both pro's and con's; but:
Is it better to run the risk of saying something while drunk and having it googled by your boss but still build semantic information about topics?
Or is it better to not log a single thing and pretend like it was never said in the first place?

IRC Privacy (or the allusion thereof) vs getting your words into the public domain!

Pick you side and tell me what you think and why.

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Vogon poet
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Privacy on IRC?? hehe.... I have seen these before, one of those shake your head and move on things.. I personally wouldnt care to chat in a channel broadcasting to the web.. NOT full log of the channel that is.. not with the way words get twisted or as sarcasm sets in ya mouth off or like mentioned already *get drunk* and do stupid things. However Help channels and other Informative channels, could benefit by it in some ways.
Many channels already use quoters, stats, and things of the sort that link to websites.. which i have no problem with. That is however usually common knowlege through topic or join message. I guess the question would be should you "have the right" to know it is being done.? Really anyone with a little web space and logging on can do a lot the same thing. So.. heh..
It has both Pros and Cons yes.. but i think i would have to side with the "I dont like its"


sometimes these are as bad as quit messages :tongue:
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Hoopy frood
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Hoopy frood
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My view is this:

There is no such thing as privacy in a public place except for the right to keep your daks zipped up of course. Where can you go in real life without being filmed or asked for ID? There's not many places, that's for sure unless you plan on going into the outback and staying there. Large companies even record your conversations with their representatives these days "for quality assurance purposes" which we all know is a load of BS but that is their claim at any rate. The Internet is really no different but I believe that there's really no time for the bot owners you mention to routinely scrutinise log files just as a local council wouldn't have the money to spend on security officers reviewing every tape they make of shopping centres and beaches. Unless a crime or some other IRC related offence has been committed then the content in logs is more or less meaningless. Anyway, there's every chance that everyone in a room is going to be logging the chat - what they log will be the same as what the bots log and they can all do what they like with the logs, posting them on their websites, etc, if that happened to appeal to them.

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Fjord artisan
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"IRC chat more or less meaningless"

God help us all smile A recent article slashdotted shows that IRC keyboard warriors aren't just slogging it out over the keyboard

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05...&tid=95

People take a lot of things too seriously!

IRC is renowned, however, for its supposed anon. nature. Another slashdotted article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/technology/circuits/06chat.html
Basically, it's putting IRC forward as the "next big evil" - the worst thing since hitler invented sliced bread. 'You could not get away with it if it weren't anon, right?'

And think of how many you see come through these forums going "where are the movies? to download?" - there is a common thinking, albeit wrong, that IRC equates to obscurity.

Does this kind of behaviour (public logging of channels syndicated into machine readable *AND GOOGLE-able* format) change that view at all?

just a ponderance

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Hoopy frood
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Whether a bot logs the conversation or not, anything you say in a channel on IRC is probably being logged by someone who can then post that log anywhere they want to if they decide it's interesting enough. I don't think there's really a privacy concern with it; whether being on IRC is anonymous or not, a simple log of your conversations on an IRC channel will be almost impossible to trace back to you in the real world even by someone who knows you personally.

Somewhere around 99.99...% of what people say on IRC is of absolutely no interest to anyone outside of the people who took part in that conversation so it's not like someone would be browsing IRC files one day and stumble across incriminating evidence about someone they knew. They would have to be searching with very specific parameters to have a chance of coming up with anything meaningful, and even then it would be the original IRCers own fault for saying something in a public channel - whether they knew it was being logged by a bot or not.

However the semantic markup being used in in the few logs I took a look at was completely wrong. Most of them seem to be using <dt> and/or <dd> for each line of text. There's not much point using semantic markup if it's not going to be used correctly.


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Hoopy frood
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Hoopy frood
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"IRC chat more or less meaningless"

No no no, not the chat itself, just the relevance of the chat content to a bot owner after the fact.

Let me give you an example. I own a couple of rooms - there is a bot (strangely enough called Bot) in those rooms. It does a different job in each room, aside from logging. In one room it is a general room management bot, in the other it does next to nothing though one thing it does do is issue an akill against someone trying a room takeover. All that aside, do I have time to read the 4GB of logs it has collected over the last two years? No chance. Even if I was on the dole there'd be no time and the content, which both you and I know to be generally fairly trivial, ie: We both know what the usual phrases are in #Teens, is of 0% interest to me. All I am implying is that most bot owners would be of the same opinion with regard to their bots.

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Fjord artisan
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Followup:
I just came across a perfect example of the power of the semantic web.

If you don't know who Tim Berners Lee is, you perhaps should. It just so happened I ran into him, during the www2004, online. I didnt believe it, but it was him alright.

I googled a bit, looking for logs of him speaking in channel, but only had other people relaying his speeches, live, to IRC.

I whois'd him, and noticed the starwood broadband hostmask -> could it be that the creator of the web as we know it, was staying at a http://www.starwood.com/ hotel?

Checking out the www2004 homepage, I find an address of where he's speaking right now: http://www.mapquest.com/...

(811 7th Avenue at 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019)
Starwood.com hotel all right.

So, basically, after a little sleuthing I've found and confirmed the ID of Tim Berners Lee on irc. The creator of the web as we know it.

This is the kind of power the semantic web offers in indexing related content.
Sure he's a very public figure and has made no effort to conceal himself, but with a little luck and a little probing I found out this much about another chatter on IRC.

Note from moderator: I've fixed the link text so it doesn't widen the page *drool*

Last edited by d00dman; 21/05/04 08:28 PM.
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Fjord artisan
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Followups:
http://usefulinc.com/chump/
http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/
http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/index.rss

The first link is to ChumpBot, an IRC bot used for taking notes about URLs.
The second link is the RDFig scratchpad - a 'live' homepage, if you will.
The third link is the RDF RSS feed of all of the links - so if I've missed whats been happening in my IRC channel, I can find out later.

Now tell me thats not kinda cool smile


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