we have disabled the site…we were under the impression that users in public chat-rooms are aware that their conversations are, by definition, public. Since people are allowed to go in and out of such channels, and anyone could be logging (and most likely automatically logging the conversations in their own IRC client) the channels, it will come as no surprise to users that their chats are available on the web. Also, we assume you are aware of the fact that IRSeek is not the first entity to place IRC logs on the web, and most likely not the last one to do it (ignoring the possibility that chat logs may be stored by others, and not made available to the entire community). We think that users/operators who believe that their discussions on public channels on IRC are private (except their IP, realname, fullname, nickname) are under a serious misconception, with-or-without IRSeek. With that, we read the responses of our users and realize that some are definitely concerned.
Great idea, but people are freaked out about having their IRC chats be public (even though they already are). IRSeek is deadpooled for now.
Update (1/4/08): IRSeek is back up in a limited form. From the IRSeek blog:
Please note that following the concerns voiced by many IRC users we have removed the majority of our content. We are hoping to bring a lot of content back as soon as we get an approval for it, together with a lot of new content.
The service now has both opt-in and opt-out features, and has scaled back its archived conversations from 300 million to 15 million. We’ll see if these moves are enough to pull it out of the deadpool.
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Meh… You win some, you lose some.
good riddance. While people shouldn’t really expect absolute privacy when they chat online, the fact is they do reasonably expect that there is not a wholesale saving, indexing, and posting of everything they say. It’s like how in person people chat pretty candidly although there’s a chance their conversation will be overheard or even recorded. However, you can bet their behavior would be different if they believed their conversations were ALWAYS recorded and shown publicly.
Is there any legal reason they cannot do what they are doing? if not, then who cares if some people are unhappy
What a bitter tirade. How old are these people that they have to resort to condescension and sarcasm? “We were under the impression…” blah blah blah. Well screw your homesteading claim-jump on making the IRC->www gateway a profitable operation. If you knew anything about IRC you’d have known you would get packeted as soon as people found out. Duh.
It’s always the most insidious of operators who cry the most. They want everybody else to operate on hippy ideals so that they don’t have to. This maximizes the amount of source material available for exploitation and makes it easier to capitalize (rape) the landscape if everyone just says “hey man, it’s all good. what’s mine is yours.” No such luck with IRC, it seems.
@Mitts: Yeah, imagine going to a party and having a tape-recorder stuck in everyone’s faces once the party got going. “What’s the big deal? This is such a good party, I just wanted to preserve it.”
@3
Probably no law that prevents it. But, if the IRC operators are unhappy about it then all it takes is a terms of service change to cause some troubles.
They could probably get away with it and continue business, but it’s probably not a good first step to give your potential user base a big f-u right up front. Wait until you have some money in the bank like Facebook.. then give the big f-u.
Wow, you people are bitter and stupid.
This wasn’t even a new idea, but clearly the amount of feedback spooked them enough to not bother. If my customer base turned out to be a bunch of whiny nerds living in their parents basements, I too, would rather jump ship and do something else.
Public chats on IRC has been archived constantly. There are tons of chatbots out there that does essentially what IRSeek does. But I guess since you people can’t think of funny quips to throw up on Bash.org then you get all jittery.
Have you also recognized the commercial usage? 37Signal’s Campfire does exactly this albeit over their own proprietary chat backend. Google’s purchase of Deja News was entirely for the decades of archives.
If you need something fear, fear the fact that when you’re logged into your Gmail account, every email, every search entry and every page you visit are saved and LINKED to your account. But hey, whatever, keep whining, losers.
If you indexed the conversation without the nick would people still care?
to me this is just like deja-vu (bought by google) indexing all the news groups, they were public groups accessed by a out of date protocol, just like irc
How ironic.
IRS Eeek!
They were probably getting a ton of threats/DOS attacks. Don’t piss off IRCers.
Alaska@7:”Google’s purchase of Deja News was entirely for the decades of archives.”
Yes, and they provided an optout mechanism to have posts removed, as well as obeying X-No-Archive.
“If my customer base turned out to be a bunch of whiny nerds living in their parents basements, I too, would rather jump ship and do something else.”
Huh, IRC. Go figure, what you’re saying is that the IRSeek people had no clue about their content providers. No wonder they failed.
“Public chats on IRC has been archived constantly. There are tons of chatbots out there that does essentially what IRSeek does. But I guess since you people can’t think of funny quips to throw up on Bash.org then you get all jittery.”
Bash doesn’t post all text of all channels, are you really making an apples-to-apple comparison? Where is the interface for me to search all past Campfire chats? Oh wait, here’s this bit from the Campfire FAQ:
–
Do you read our chats? What about privacy?
We do not read your chats — your conversations are your conversations. Please refer to our privacy policy for additional details.
–
Looks like Campfire is really dropping the ball, eh?
Look, in this country, as long as you don’t tell anyone you’re spying on them, they are perfectly okay with you doing so. They can always just assume either that you’re not doing it, or presume you’re not doing it to *them*. But *telling* them that you *are* doing it is immoral.
Next time, IRSeek, just pretend you are really there to help them with their taxes. Have your bots spit out 1040A tips on request.
not surprised.
How is this a big deal? Did the techcrunch editor do even any research? There are plenty of other search engines that search FULL IRC conversations + XDCC.
#14
it’s true! lolables on roflcopters
Alaska Miller is confused on at least one point: it’s not clear who IRSeek’s customer base is. Given the reaction, it seems fair to say that the customer base certainly ISN’T the IRC users, who apparently have an aggressive dislike of the company’s practices.
It’s not so much that people are freaked about it being public. It’s more that people are freaked out about everything they said indexed and available for searching in 1 convenient location.
See Freenode’s thoughts http://blog.freenode.net/?p=62
Especially the part as to using tor and have nothing to identify them. Seems like they are trying to much to keep it secret.
“…are under a serious misconception”
hahaha.. trying to blame IRC regualars for their own misconceptions about the ethics of spying on conversations.
FYI, the sites that publish IRC convos do it for entertainment, are posted by IRC users themselves, and are not used for search.
This is by far the most ill conveived and poorly thought out startup I’ve ever come accross.
I only wish I’d found it first. Reviewing it wouldn’t made my day.
Anybody else wondering whether MediaSentry is involved in this somewhere?
LiveJournal was purchased by us Russians. Where’s the blog TC? Don’t be scared. I will not come after you or your friends with LJ accounts who talks crap about my administration.
If they wanted to be upfront about what they were doing, they wouldn’t have needed to go through tor to do it, would have had a clear OPT-IN policy, not OPT-OUT and their bots would have been clearly identified so that IRC ops could allow/disallow at their discretion.
It sounds like when or if they do come back, they’ll be doing this the right way. Only problem is who will trust them with this history?
for how much!!!!!????
who didn’t see this coming..
They have a great product but they should probably try to refocus it on internal corporate or corporate-customer chat. If their indexing, searching, and presentation UI was tied to a speech recognition engine, it would be a killer app for meeting transcription.
Call it a casualty of Facebook-Syndrome.
After Facebook tried to pull a fast one with their Beacon stalking system, everyone needs to wise up about what they do with other people’s data…
Uh-huh. Whether this is/was legal or not (doubtful it would be in all countries), the fact of logging everything said for a couple of years (?) AND doing their best to avoid being caught doing it doesn’t tell me great many good things about the morals of these guys.
Logging software development chats is one thing (this would actually be useful), logging personal just-for-fun chats (public or not) is another, in terms of what an be found out about you’re being looked up through a search service. Can’t help but include a link to this piece of (so far) fiction
http://www.radaronline.com/fro.....trol_1.php)
Well there is a long standing copyright issue too. If you wrote something it belongs to you. If someone takes it and copies it wholesale without as much as a terms of service, I am sure it could be construed as a copyright violation. When you sign on facebook you explicitly agree to allow facebook to do they things it does… So I am sure if there were some powerful irc users they could easily sue the company for copyright violations for posting their entire conversations online.
I really don’t see ANY reason logging IRC conversations. Most chatters don’t even chat about their topic / channel name. If you were going to search IRC logs for technical help, you are better off using Google.
Ilan
an Israeli IRC Junkie..
P.S. http://www.NetSplit.de never let me down..
Nothing compares to messenger, all competition is doomed!
Can I ask that the folks at TechCrunch wait at least a week or two before profiling every bullsh*t business idea/vaporware company that comes knocking on the TechCrunch doors.
If they’d been in stealth mode for 6 months, and built some technology they wouldn’t have given up after 4 days of coming out of stealth mode.
Let’s get back to profiling “real” companies…
If you were going to search IRC logs for technical help, you are better off using Google.
What if you were going to provide information about people trading MP3s and movies to the rightsholders? I’m guessing IRSeek is going to continue behind the scenes and we’ll start seeing some RIAA/MPAA suits coming down in a few months based on IRseek’s data.
I like to poop on cats and sip Merlot while a donkey licks my butt.
Haha loop.
It’s the Jews again! irseek is from Israel
They trying to control ALL the media? lol