Be careful what you say on IRC

[wideawakewesley]

New Israeli startup IRSeek is indexing public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at the rate of 6 milion conversations a day. 300 million conversations have now been indexed by the company. The most popular networks, including EFnet, DALnet, Freenode and QuakeNetUndernet, are all being monitored - IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks.

http://www.irseek.com/result.php?keywords=totally+rad+show

[mittop]

Egads. I imagine this has probably been going on in government channels for some time. But now companies are doing it, which means they can sell it to your employer. Good advice, watch what you say, or more importantly, watch where you say it from.

Might I recommend TOR (The Onion Router) for you nervous nellies out there?

[harlo]

IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks.


I'm not sure I believe that number. I think it's slightly less then 2000+. I think the grand total is around 1984 channels. ;)

[gonzooo]

At what level are they listening in on? I'm thinking they'd have to tap in serverside to listen in on anyone against their will. (And what kind of IRC server would give them total access to all communication?)

QuakeNet, at least, does not have any apparent userflags for staying invisible in a channel. They have channelflags that determine whether a user is displayed in the userlist until he is voiced/opped, or sends a message to the channel.

So, where am I going with this? I guess what I mean is you're "safe" in your personal channel with 10 friend, because someone joining and not responding isn't exactly going to be invisible.

If you're in a very big channel and you're not watching what you say, I don't think some log-service on the web is going to be your biggest problem.

Added 17:01:
Oh, and if you think so lowly of a IRC network to suspect them of selling/giving your conversations to these people in a dishonest way, get the **** out of there, being there is obviously a bad idea for you.

[diane]

So the Israeli government wants to know who I have a crush on and on Cyber's addiction to KoL?

[cyber34]

Yes they want to pick up strategies so they can get more meat to sell on ebay.

Uhh yeah we're like on a rather small network right now, and we have a close relationship with the network admins, if there was any sort of suspicious activity we could do something about it.