Thread by @plainoldchair

Freenode Meltdown Update # I Can't Believe I'm Still Doing This: #freenode is arguing about whose passwords may have been compromised due to network admins not blocking "nickserv"/"chanserv" names being used by users, possibly resulting in users sending passwords to bad actors.

Confirmation from Freenode staff that, for some period of time, an IRCop had "their bot" signed in as nickserv and was receiving passwords sent by users attempting to authenticate. Note this was sent as a wallops message (not a global notice), which most users would not see.

Note that WALLOPS is opt-in; most users never see these messages at all. Passwords were potentially compromised, and freenode staff are ignoring requests to send a global notice instead, which every user would see.

Andrew Lee has now claimed that a global notice is pending, but nobody is saying when or what it will contain, and Andrew Lee also denies that any passwords were leaked even though he has literally no way of knowing that. Requests for further information currently unanswered

Here's how staff are currently handling requests for information from users.

It's been about 3 hours, if not more, since Andrew Lee said a global notice would go out about the services/compromised password issue. No word on it yet.

Finally a global notice was sent, but doesn't mention any potential password leak, and doesn't advise users to change passwords. Time in EDT

In case you're curious what the conversation there is like concerning cybersecurity and ethics, here's a sample!

Additionally, Andrew Lee is complaining about "cancel culture" on the #freenode website again, and has decided the solution to this is to emulate the healthiest bastion of civil discourse you can find online:

Chan boards.

I mean, I guess it's technically true that if you're anonymous, nobody can hold you accountable for what you say. It's a reasonable experiment; it's not as if we have 20 years of empirical data showing exactly how wrong this can go, or anything like that

Also note that it's not anonymous either: You need to be on your primary nick, identified with nickserv, in order to use it at all, and it assigns you a new nickname in that channel.

So instead of being anonymous, it's just a pseudonym within a pseudonym, and staff know who you are anyway.

Update: sorcerer (freenode staff) had claimed that kisser was one of their bots used to reserve the "nickserv" nick while services were down. Now kisser is speaking on their own, and apparently staff themselves, and staff are trying to hush anyone asking what the hell this means.

So either kisser was staff already and sorcerer lied about them being a bot, or kisser was hastily made staff after the fact to cover up the fact that non-staff had temporary access to nickserv.

Staff are currently dodging questions about WHEN kisser was made staff.

People are still trying to figure out WHEN kisser became staff, and kisser is displaying an interesting level of professionalism in response.

Thankfully, Freenode's owner has shown up to clear up the situation, and by "clear up the situation" I mean "silence the channel while providing no further information".

Kisser actually responded to a PM, but told me to "wait for the official answer" to whether he was made staff before or after the incident. Seems like a simple enough question that they wouldn't need to get their stories straight first, but okay.

Another Freenode staffer, eskimo (who I've mentioned before) was confronted in another network about his transphobia and homophobia, to which he responded by flagrantly lying and dodging questions.

"I've done nothing wrong in years" followed up with him using the same slurs two weeks ago is just some outstanding chutzpah on his part. I guess 0.038 years is still "years" though

Of course, whether you care about staffers being bigoted or not, there's also the same staffer using dick pics to harass people, as mentioned in this thread.

https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1403094977660526603

Eskimo is now threatening to sue people over this.
<eskimo> Ariadne: you're also going to be hearing from some lawyers and the courts. I asked you to stop defaming me and my software and to stop stalking me, yet you dug through more logs from years ago and posted more shit.

Speaking of him being a creeper: Imagine being a mail carrier and some weirdo tweets out a secretly recorded video of you scratching your balls to the USPS, saying you shouldn't have a job. This is the kind of guy who complains about "cancel culture".

https://twitter.com/eskimo_dev/status/1296519339315810304

and he's gone (which is why Ariadne deleted some tweets linked above related to him)

I just woke up to find that freenode accidentally banned the entirety of @IRCCloud while I was asleep, and people in the fake 4chan channel are now complaining about "communists"

A Freenode staffer just PM'd me saying they saw my tweets, and wanted to know if I wanted to write up a policy draft FOR them.

I have no idea why anyone at Freenode thought I would want to do that. It's pretty obvious that anything I would want out of Freenode policy is not what Andrew Lee would be interested in, and I have no interest in doing free work for people I can't even trust to be honest.

Like, yeah, I could write up a draft of the kind of policy I would want to see on an IRC network, but it operating using premises, reasoning, and conclusions that Andrew Lee's Freenode have already expressed opposition to, so what the hell is the point?

My best guess? By asking for my input, they can say they're responding to criticism in good faith. Now they can say that they solicited my input, but I declined, ergo I'm just whining and have no interest in improving things. Here's why that's bullshit:

1) Andrew Lee's STATED GOALS AND VALUES are in direct opposition to my own. There is no honest policy I could write that would allow for something like #anonchan, or reflect his views on things like "cancel culture". They're asking me to write recipes using poisoned wellwater.

2) Freenode staff, including Lee himself, have proven themselves hopelessly dishonest, disingenuous, and incompetent. Even if the network had decent written policy, I couldn't trust them to apply it consistently. When they're just doing whatever, whyever, whenever, policy is moot

This is a sinking ship captained by a lying buffoon who keeps hiring untrained, inebriated orangutans and lying about what they're doing. Under those circumstances, I do not feel it would be helpful to help them pretend they're doing their due diligence in keeping things afloat.

I would also like to state how implausible it is that they're asking in good faith for a new draft policy from someone who is currently banned from #freenode

Freenode is (was?) the largest IRC network on Earth by far, and home to innumerable high-profile projects. I can't stress enough how ironic it is that the drama, lies, and incompetency I'm seeing there now are on par with those of tiny friend-group networks I belonged to in 2003.

I should note that the channel I'm in on Libera.chat currently features Alex Jones apologia and similar nonsense, so I'm not saying I implicitly trust the place, but those people at least appear to be outliers and I see no reason to distrust Libera staff at this time

This isn't a dig at Libera, just a disclaimer that IRC culture as a whole is full of outdated attitudes and bad actors; Freenode's situation did not arise in a vacuum. I have reason to believe Libera will handle this better than others have, but I can't take it for granted either

Andrew Lee's current official story involving kisser is that kisser was staff at the time of the nickserv incident, but that kisser was working with sorcerer on a bot at the time, so kisser WAS sorcerer's bot but IS ALSO staff and was staff at the time. My head hurts

After not speaking for a while (except in the "anonymous" channel), I got klined from Freenode for "abusive behavior". I expected that to happen eventually, but apparently they've done this to multiple people for suspicious reasons, including Waggie, group contact for Wikipedia.

Things are going great!!! The FSF seems to have had control of their channels on Freenode taken away, wrecking their plans for a gradual transition.

https://twitter.com/fsf/status/1403941542532952067

From the Freenode staff quotes I've got, it's completely up in the air whether or not the ban of THE ENTIRETY OF @IRCCloud was intentional.
<taw> IRCCloud was not klined by mistake.
<taw> We don't allow IRCCloud on freenode.
--
<taw> mst: I don't see it being klined as of now.

@IRCCloud .@eskimo_dev is no longer staff, but is still in #freenode to defend himself against the recent allegations against him, and by "defend himself against recent allegations against him" I mean "double down on his continued use of transphobic slurs against people he doesn't like".

@IRCCloud @eskimo_dev I can't believe he keeps digging. Why does this keep working.

Anyone who uses @IglooIRC or @arxius_io should probably be aware that in addition to the developer having allegations against him concerning the use of users' nude pics, he's also a raging homophobe and transphobe.

@IRCCloud @eskimo_dev @IglooIRC @arxius_io oh I almost forgot he played this card, good show

@IRCCloud @eskimo_dev @IglooIRC @arxius_io Back to more important things like "freenode leaking user passwords", I've come up with a handy infographic to more concisely express the official freenode stance on the subject:

@IRCCloud @eskimo_dev @IglooIRC @arxius_io Andrew Lee wants to CANCEL CANCEL CULTURE, by which I mean "ban services that disagreed with him on social media"

https://mobile.twitter.com/kaetemi/status/1404160690881925124

Eskimo, who I showed arguing in #freenode that it's OK to call LGBT people slurs and that "being gay is a choice", and who resigned over allegations of severe misuse of his own clients' data, has chanop status again.

*/* r​oot changed mode on #freenode@freenode to +o eskimo

And apparently his alt connection still has a staff cloak.

https://twitter.com/nicolas09F9/status/1404187989861863435

Asked root (rasengan/Andrew Lee) how racist/homophobic I'd have to be in order to get +o, and got banned from #freenode for my trouble. "Your behaviour is not conducive to the desired environment." I'd normally agree, but I guess being openly homophobic IS conducive to it?

l0de, a self-described "core member" of troll group GNAA, is now a channel operator in #freenode, and is using the opportunity to defend racist stuff the GNAA has done and make autism jokes.

Meanwhile l0de is talking openly about the channels he/staff have taken over, and Andrew Lee is having a TOTALLY NORMAL ONE in there

Received an interesting variety of responses regarding my concerns re: Eskimo being on staff again.

andrew lee banned me because earth is a planet. Not sure when I can update next.

<ChipButty> then sorcerer claimed kisser was his bot
<ChipButty> but then kisser was staff all of a sudden and saying weird shit in chat
← ChipButty has left (Killed (root (earth is a planet.)))

Andrew Lee is running low on copium.

04:16 < nevermind> root, was this really how you wanted it to go down though?
04:16 <@root> nevermind: nah, this isn't going well.
04:16 <@root> this is going really really bad.

I'm hearing that freenode has also banned.... freenode's own web chat client. This is bonkers.

I was using that when I was killed from the server by Andrew Lee about two hours ago. Is that when he banned the web client? I did I take freenode's web chat client down with me?

Correction regarding l0de's channel registration. He was actually registering channels on libera.chat that he had no interest in to squat in them like #india, channels meant to look "official" like #liberia, and channels that would be unwelcome at all like #gnaa.

He's trying to frame this as an issue of "staff corruption stealing channels" to deflect from Freenode staff actions. There's a difference between revoking long-standing channels of legit projects, and preventing someone from registering channels to squat them or troll users.

I normally wouldn't give an actual self-avowed troll the time of day here, except to demonstrate how ridiculous things have gotten at Freenode, but in this case, my facts were mistaken and the truth was something roughly as dumb, but differently dumb.

"Last remaining >1000 user community channel seized by freenode staff"
linux.chat/linux-on-freen…

Libera.chat is also wearing on me a bit with their inability to properly deal with people who think it's fun & hilarious to call your opponents "gay" and make AIDS jokes in 2021, but, like I said, IRC culture is a little behind the times in some ways.

On the other hand, I trust Libera's staff to be reasonable and deal with this kind of thing when they see it. I'm on edge from everything in freenode and understand that Libera is new and things are rather hectic. They definitely have their hands full.

Eskimo doesn't know the policies of the network he's helping to run. Freenode's current policy page says nothing at all about hate speech.

He also doesn't get the difference between "an opinion" and bluntly saying it's OK to mock people for being gay/trans, including using slurs

Oh my god. During an upgrade, freenode nuked nick and channel registrations. All of them. No warning.

https://twitter.com/CodyKretsinger/status/1404594512006156288?s=19

People are saying that #freenode is invite only and nick registration isn't even working. They managed to set the dumpster fire on fire.

There were channels there registered in the previous millennium. At least 23 years of history gone just like that with no warning to anyone.

I was able to get into #freenode okay but can confirm that everything is gone. All channels and nick registrations are nuked with no warnings and no plans to restore them. Email is apparently busted so IRCops are verifying nick registrations. All is chaos.

Currently watching in the most fitting possible medium: MS Comic Chat.

mean mean mean

From IRC: "so, freenode is split into (at least) 3: a new ircd with an empty services DB, plus the old freenode has at least two netsplit components, one with services and one without"

Here's some more detailed information. devever.net/~hl/freenode_s…

Managed to drop my nick on "Old Freenode" (connect at rinnegan.freenode.net) and suggest everyone do the same. You don't want these people keeping your information.

Meanwhile, just saw someone get banned from #help for trying to make a GDPR request.

The most bizarre thing is that Andrew Lee decided to nuke the place and start fresh IMMEDIATELY after launching and advertising a bunch of new features, like anonbot and the BBS. This whole thing reeks of having no actual plan or strategy.

this ms comic chat feed is so good

andrew lee was just threatening me with legal action according to UK law for dodging a ban. I do not live in the UK.

can't believe I'm gonna get extradited to the UK for connecting to an IRC network from another computer

freenode is foss, let me just figure this git thing out

seeing people getting kicked from #freenode for "racism" for pointing out that Andrew Lee had given ops to an unrepentant GNAA member. I am clueless

Another person got booted for "racism" for calling Andrew Lee a clown, and I'm trying to figure out which race is being insulted here

andrew lee continuing to have an extremely normal day here

15:42:06 -!- Xavierdarkness was kicked from #freenode by rasengan [stop talking about me]

BANNED FOR TERRORISM

19:53 < ashmandias> king rasengan did you ever say how much money you spent to destroy freenode?
19:53 -!- mode/#freenode [+b *!*@libre.theyareafter.us] by rasengan
19:53 -!- ashmandias was kicked from #freenode by rasengan [terrorism]