freenode news

freenode Community Team

Swant — Tue, 18 Oct 2016 21:34:00 +0100

Hi,

You might not be aware that freenode has a dedicated community team and that we would be delighted to help your projects get the most from freenode. The freenode community team consists of christel, edk, JonathanD, mquin, Myrtti, nhandler, Swant and tomaw, and we would love to help you spread the word about releases and launches, conferences or events and any other project milestones that may be of interest to our shared communities. We are happy to make announcements on IRC, reshare your social media posts and we would love for you to guest author or co-author a blog post for the freenode website.

If you think this is something that would be useful for your project, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us! You can find us in #freenode-community or drop us a line to community@freenode.net.

Resurrecting Tor, continued

christel — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 20:18:00 +0100

Following an embarrassingly long period of no Tor support, we recently blogged about resurrecting Tor.

As of today, Tor users can once more connect to freenode over Tor; the hidden service address is

Resurrecting tor-sasl

edk — Mon, 05 Sep 2016 16:09:00 +0100

As many of you will no doubt be aware, freenode used to run a Tor hidden service, providing anonymous access to the network. Unfortunately, this had to be disabled due to concerns about abuse.

We regret that it has taken some time to resolve this issue but we are now almost ready to deploy some software updates that will allow us to re-enable the gateway. We've made one important change: password-based SASL authentication is disabled over the Tor gateway, so you'll need to generate a client certificate and add its fingerprint (/msg NickServ CERT ADD) over a regular connection before connecting.

We'd appreciate your help testing this setup on our testnet. Further instructions can be found in #freenode there. (if you already have a certificate set, the hidden service is at ircs://testnet67chdulhs.onion:6697)

Happy Birthday to the World Wide Web

Swant — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 22:06:00 +0000

25 years ago—On the 6'th of August 1991—the world's first website went live, and it's still there.

In other words, the world wide web is celebrating silver jubilee today.

Imagine where we would've been without it. Would your project exist? Would freenode exist?

A Reminder

edk — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 22:06:00 +0000

Hi all,

In the distant past, freenode fairly frequently sent /wallops about news of conferences, releases or anything else that might be of interest to the FOSS community. We'd quite like to do more of that, so… if you know of anything that might fit the bill, please drop the community team a line at groups@freenode.net or message me (my nickname is e) on IRC (even if the project in question isn't (yet) registered with freenode).

We'd also like to feature a bit more FOSS news on our blog, so if you're itching to write a guest post for us, I'd love to hear about that as well.

Help protect net neutrality in the EU

edk — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 14:58:00 +0000

As many of you no doubt know, the European Union passed legislation last year intended to protect net neutrality. However, it contained significant loopholes which many people believe will allow European ISPs to prioritise paying partners' traffic. Among other things, this is potentially quite scary for FOSS projects—most of which don't have the kind of funding necessary to enter into such arrangements.

If this is something that concerns you, campaigns aimed at convincing BEREC to close the loopholes are running at https://www.savenetneutrality.eu/ and https://savetheinternet.eu/en/.

AFD quiz

mniip — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 12:00:00 +0000

As a tradition, we would like to invite our users to participate in the annual April Fool's Day quiz.

Good luck and have fun! You can join us in #ircpuzzles for casual conversation.

IyMjIyMjQUZEMjAxNlN0YXJ0

New Website

christel — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 23:25:00 +0000

If you are reading this you have most probably already realised that our brand spanking new website is up and running. On behalf of freenode I would like to express heartfelt thanks to dsample, edk, Swant, thefam, emerson and SteinSplitter and boxmein -- not only for the help in designing the new website based on a very fickle and constantly changing spec but also for providing tremendously amusing banter and generally being awesome guys! You did beautifully and it has been an absolute pleasure working with you, I can't wait to do it again sometime (soon!).

Oh, and the new website is hosted with Github Pages.

Recent Events and Future Changes

spb — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 13:11:54 +0000

Many of you have been asking questions about the recent rash of high-profile staff resignations, and we feel we owe you all both an explanation and an apology.

First, the explanation: in short, it's become clear over recent months that freenode has lost its way somewhat, when compared to the ideals and goals that we were created with. A growing sense of disillusionment amongst those of us who remember the olden days, when we were far more friendly, approachable and engaged in the communities we were set up to serve, has recently come to a head. Naturally, when some of these people decided they could no longer continue with the way things had become, it was time for us to think long and hard about what had gone wrong and what we should do about it.

And so, to the apology. We're uncomfortably aware that freenode was set up with the strong idea that the projects and communities which use it should be the first, and often the only, priority. We've lost sight of that, and we're sorry. We'll be doing our best, from now on, to get back in touch with the ideals that made freenode such a great place.

The New Policies

spb — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 13:11:52 +0000

One of the several problems that's become obvious in recent times is that we have too many policies, they're often not consistent with each other, and we've spent too much time and effort wondering whether something, which is obviously the right thing to do, fits with our published policy. With that in mind, the following stripped-back set of policies will apply in future, with the intention that we can set out a simple set of baselines and apply common sense on top of them.

Nickname ownership

Nicknames are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, to the first person who registers the name with NickServ. However, we expect users to act in good faith and reserve the right to remove a nickname registration where we believe that this has not been the case. Nickname and account registrations expire ten weeks after they are last used. For nicknames, 'used' means that you were using the nickname while logged in to the account which owns it. For accounts, 'used' means that you logged in to the account, regardless of the nickname you used to do so. Nicknames which are the primary account name only expire when the entire account is expired. In some cases, such as for very old accounts, we may, at our discretion, extend the expiry time of a nickname or account. We will not normally do this beyond 15 weeks past the last use.

Services database purge

mrmist — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 08:58:13 +0000

On or around Friday, October 2nd, we shall be cleaning up the services database. This involves the bulk removal of expired nicks, channels and accounts.

Therefore, please remember to identify to services when you connect ( /msg nickserv help identify ) and to use your grouped nicks whilst identified - remember, they all expire separately.

Nicks that are past the expiry threshold of 120 days unidentified on October 2nd will be freed from the database and available for others to register.

Helping GNOME defend its trademark

christel — Tue, 11 Nov 2014 10:49:11 +0000

The GNOME project will be familiar to the vast majority of our users, what you might not be aware of is that the project is currently facing an expensive trademark battle against Groupon with the latter having allegedly chosen to infringe upon GNOME's trademark by launching a product with the same name (a POS "operating system for merchants to run their entire operation").

I am not going to go into the details here, as they have been explained by the GNOME project over at http://www.gnome.org/groupon/ and the GNOME folk are in a much better position than me to provide more detailed information on the matter.

What I am going to do is appeal for your help. The GNOME project is looking to raise $80,000 to cover the legal costs involved in defending their trademark. At the time of writing this post the freenode network has 89,998 connected users. Users who are passionate about FOSS.

Atheme 7.2 and freenode

tomaw — Sat, 08 Nov 2014 23:18:51 +0000

Hello!

We've begun some testing on Atheme's latest release, 7.2, and we'd like to invite interested users to help with that.

Not all changes the Atheme project has included in their new release will be included in our Atheme upgrade, so here's the bulk of the changes that will actually affect our network:

User-enabled sendpass

njan — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 21:20:17 +0000

As a network, we feel it is hugely important to maintain close relationships with our many communities and users. Our interactions with users in #freenode and elsewhere on the network, fielding support requests and assisting users, help build and maintain these relationships.

But we're constantly looking for things to change and make better, and one of the pieces of feedback we've had is that users would like a little automation - and the ability to be able to resolve some of their own support requests.

We recognise that allowing users to generate their own password reset e-mails brings us in line with other registration systems online and may provide a higher quality of service.

Server Issues: Update

Pricey — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 21:27:44 +0000

Following up on our previous blog post, we have continued to investigate the compromise of freenode infrastructure, aided by our sponsors in addition to experts in the field.

NCC Group's Cyber Defence Operations team kindly provided pro bono digital forensic and reverse engineering services to assist our infrastructure team and have recently published a report with some of their findings:

https://www.nccgroup.com/en/blog/2014/10/analysis-of-the-linux-backdoor-used-in-freenode-irc-network-compromise/