Comments on: Fastest DeadPool Ever? IRSeek Shuts Down

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 02:32:40 +0000

It’s the Jews again! irseek is from Israel
They trying to control ALL the media? lol

By: Ibod Catooga

Ibod Catooga — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 12:52:07 +0000

I like to poop on cats and sip Merlot while a donkey licks my butt.

Haha loop.

By: EH

EH — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:45:03 +0000

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.

By: Ijonas Kisselbach

Ijonas Kisselbach — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:07:15 +0000

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…

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:06:21 +0000

Nothing compares to messenger, all competition is doomed!

By: Ilan

Ilan — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:50:40 +0000

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..

By: Mr. K

Mr. K — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:05:43 +0000

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.

By: Anyone

Anyone — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:07:35 +0000

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)

By: Humble Pie

Humble Pie — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:52:05 +0000

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…

By: Ben M

Ben M — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 03:09:43 +0000

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.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 02:01:18 +0000

who didn’t see this coming..

By: Kimmer

Kimmer — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:47:01 +0000

for how much!!!!!????

By: TDavid

TDavid — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:46:52 +0000

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?

By: Putin

Putin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:37:40 +0000

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.

By: EH

EH — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 01:28:44 +0000

Anybody else wondering whether MediaSentry is involved in this somewhere?

By: StartupEarth

StartupEarth — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:59:05 +0000

“…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.

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:49:58 +0000

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.

By: AnonTroll

AnonTroll — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:44:13 +0000

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.

By: Alaska Moron

Alaska Moron — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:42:51 +0000

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.

By: @k

@k — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:22:33 +0000

#14

it’s true! lolables on roflcopters

By: CK

CK — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:02:18 +0000

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.

By: Chris R.

Chris R. — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:36 +0000

not surprised.

By: K

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:00:22 +0000

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.

By: EH

EH — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:58:55 +0000

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?

By: Bob Loblaw

Bob Loblaw — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:57:41 +0000

They were probably getting a ton of threats/DOS attacks. Don’t piss off IRCers.