Crypto,
#freenode, ExpressVPN, Search Engines, and the Crown Prince of Korea - The Spaghetti Code Chronicles: Episode #1
Freenode has, after dying, disappeared - sort of... [You may want to boost this if you're a
#FOSSie or Crypto Enthusiast]
https://freenode.net/n/freenode/80/freenode-belongs-to-you This is really hard to explain, unless you understand the blow by blow chain of events because you lived through them. Maybe you are a large FOSS project whose
#IRC chans on freenode were hijacked by the
#Crown_Prince_of_Korea - Andrew Lee, or woke up one morning to realize that there were now two major
#IRC_networks - one growing faster than any other before, and one shrinking even faster as users and
#FOSS projects jumped ship for other IRC networks and communication protocols like fleas jumping off of a cat being eaten by a reticulated python.
It's waaaay too complicated to go into the [recent] history of what happened just a few months ago, and I'm going to paste a blob below of part of the monolog by
#Andrew_Lee explaining it from his point of view - specifically, where he's at now and where he's trying to go. It at least attempts to gesso over the top of the previously painted picture, trying to recast and depict him as the altruistic philanthropist that he claims to have been all along.
Okay, from my perspective, what he did was, well I won't say unforgivable, but the enormity of damage he instigated when setting alight what he refers to as, "#The_IRC_Wars", has indeed been enormous.
Most of us would simply characterize the mass exodus from freenode to
#Libera in an almost parallel manner to how General Chiang Kai-shek and the government of the Republic of China fled the mainland and re-established themselves on the island of Formosa (Taiwan) - in that scenario, I suppose you could draw the inference that the Crown Prince of Korea, Andrew Lee, in that screenplay, has been cast as Mao Tse-tung.
Comparisons aside, Mr. Lee has not murdered anyone (certainly not 101 million of his own people like Chairman Mao did), and IRC is just a protocol, and freenode (the legal entity) is/was simply a property of "Private Internet Access" - but this is only the very beginning of the story, and only scratching the surface... This goes really, really fricken' deep buoys and gulls.
For the very brave, read on, I can't do this topic justice in only 10,000 characters, but I can show you where many of the burrows are in the plains for all of the rodents tunneling underneath - and it may actually freak you out to discover who some of these players are....
I promise this is a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly - without the flute or cigar.
Okay, first, let's give out some kudos to Andrew Lee for finding a way to, at least from his perspective, recover from the bruising he received, and that the
#Libera_Chat IRC network could care less about - they've moved on, along with any FOSS projects that where either voluntarily migrated or forcefully expelled when their freenode channels and projects were hijacked by Andrew Lee.
When you first visit Freenode's .net website you'll notice that it's gone - no mention of an IRC network. It looks likes a cheap version of
#Lotide or
#Lemmy, but it's actually a non-Fediverse link aggregator called
#Throat.
If you start poking around because you already know that there used to be an IRC network called freenode, you can find links to it in a sidebar after clicking around for a bit. Everything is, sort of, still there (they did change the Authentication methods). Okay so freenode's website was never very good at navigating or branding the
#IRC_network itself, but now it's virtually hidden.
We all know that what precipitated the downfall of freenode was the transfer of ownership to Andrew Lee's company,
#Private_Internet_Access, but what you most probably are not aware of is the web of companies involved.
If you visit the
#privateinternetaccess site today they'e selling subscriptions to what they claim is the most secure VPN service available - just like every other company that provides these types of services. But when digging around on the freenode domain, I found an amazing dissertation by
#Crown_Prince_Lee that actually softened my position on him in a very significant way - I still think he's a bonehead, yet I can see that at least in his own mind, he felt that he was saving the Internet in the name of freedom, or some shit like that.
So I got his with a webchat offer, you know, when the company of a brand is trying to capture your business without letting you escape? I bit down on the bait and figured we'd go for a little ride.
I first checked to make sure I wasn't being serviced by a bot, then I asked about freenode (I'll post my chat log screenies), I was told that
#PIA does NOT own freenode, but that both are owned by another company. When I asked, I was told that this company is
#Kape_Technologies.
Now I landed here trying to find out what's up with
#Gigablast one of my longstanding fav search engines for about 20 years now. about six months or so ago, they stated that they had partnered with "freenode" to power the
#private_dot_sh privacy based search engine.
So....
#Kape... a company that owns freenode, and private_sh, and PIA (a VPN service), and a shitload of other companies - none of which have any information linking their associations to others - except for Kape itself, but freenode is noticably absent there - you'll see why in a bit.
So the private-dot-sh search engine does not mention Gigablast in the least. Gigablast is still privately owned and operated by
#Matt_Wells , and has been for over twenty years since he left
#InfoSeek, and it also provides search results to
#ixquick's
#StartPage, and the
#Internet_Archive, among others. It's one of the biggest deals in web indexing you may never have heard of...
But no mention of Gigablast at
#private_sh.
If you visit Kape's website, you'll notice that there is around a dozen or more brands it owns (Andrew Lee owns, unbeknownst to most folks), including
#ExpressVPN, which most folks have heard of through radio, television, and Internet ads.
Okay let's turn now to freenode specifically, Lee states that according to legislation passed last year in the state of
#Wyoming, he has, or is planning on incorporating an algorithmically managed company, because these new laws allow them to own other corporations.
What's that you say? It's a
#DAO - an
#Distributed_Autonomous_Organization.
Lee has basically, (or says he intends to), incorporated a DAO, which will own freenode, which itself already owns
https://IRC.com - which appears to be both an
#Android client AND an IRC network - but the client is not available at
#F_Droid (F-Droid).
The
IRC.com client is apparently based on or supporting of
#Kiwi and
#inspIRCd.
The page where Lee lays all of this out is listed near the top of this post. Lee states that he wants to turn freenode over to "the people", as a completely distributed network, under the custodianship of a DAO.
The problem here, is that, unlike
#XMPP or
#Matrix, and other decentralized communication protocols, IRC doesn't have any way to really federate across domains (not really, individual servers can have hostnames from different domains, but it's a single network that you're just throwing more horsepower at to keep it running), It can only scale vertically by having more
#ircd servers join a particular, monolithic network.
But anyway, here is his interesting take on how he has begun to give over freenode (The brand? The network? It's properties like
IRC.com and that client/network?) to
#The_People, or claims to do so very soon.
The most interesting thing is that he really appears to harbor no ill will towards those who he feels stabbed him in the back, which may be lip service, or it may be a noble gesture, after all, he did lay himself out prostrate, defending his actions and intentions at
#hackernews in the days following the calamity that started all of this, which is something I've never seen any other billionaire bother to do. So my feelings toward him are rather ambiguous at this point, quite an improvement over how I used to feel about him....
He makes no mention of which
#blockchain he intends to issue
#tokens for with respect to the DAO - Let's hope it's based on the blockchains of
#XLM or
#SOL or
#ADA and not
#ETH.
He's actually planning on giving ownership of freenode to the users of Libera as well as whomever is left at freenode, and that is some rather visionary forward thinking in and of itself - but we'll see what really happens.
Here's what Lee envisions:
1.) A DAO, all token holders participate in corporate management and decision-making.
2.) The allocations are as follows:
The freenode userbase will be 25% of all tokens.
The freenode channels will be 10% of all tokens.
The Libera userbase will be 25% of all tokens.
The Libera channel base will be 10% of all tokens.
For the Libera team, in continuing to recognize their importance in the ecosystem of the FOSS community. Their allocation is 15% of all tokens.
Operators who helped to protect freenode, 2.5% of all tokens, and for the current freenode staff 5%,
freenode owns
IRC.com and 2.5% of all tokens have been allocated for this partner.
Lee, as the owner of freenode allocates himself 5% of all tokens.
Note: This news is two months old. There were six comments made to the blog article, all of which were deleted by Lee.
Okay, I'm interested in hearing everyone's thoughts. This is still apparently a fluid situation whether the concept of a freenode is at all relevant or not.
⛵
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