> Qubes should not associate themselves with freenode or irc. That"s just my > opinion. Nobody with self respect or integrity has taken freenode serious for > over 10 years. It should stay unofficial.
Not to knock what you're saying, but I think it's important for us to draw a distinction as a community between the infrastructure being potentially dangerous (which is the approach taken by ITL to the google list, the hosting services etc) with clear suggested mitigating actions for the end user to take (use GPG email, verify your ISO download etc) and the possibility that there are malicious individuals present on a medium wanting to do naive users harm (which seems on its face to be an argument towards moderating the IRC channels). Neither seem to be solved problems for IRC. We're in the difficult position of most other Linux distributions maintaining a freenode / IRC presence and advertising this [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] i.e. it's semi expected there will be some semi respectable community members idling. A very interesting point here is it's taken as a given that people understand that you should take advice on IRC at your own risk, and not explicitly stated anywhere by any of those distros. I don't think we should assume this is common knowledge for our user base, which I would argue is made up of very technically minded users, as well as users with other motivations (security, privacy) without much in the way of technical knowledge. Either camp may bowl up to the #qubes channel. If we think this is a bad idea™ I think we ought to clearly state so and why on the website. I can't immediately see on the website if anything is said of IRC, I thought the unofficial channel had been moved to OFTC for better tor support but I don't immediately see a mention of that. > I think google forums are a lot easier to use then installing some irc client > or connecting to a webchat, where the only people there are criminals or > spammers who want to exploit you or the network. Yes definitely easier, but a lot of people want to hang around and immerse themselves in community chat to learn, or to be part of that community. We shouldn't underestimate the number of people out there who outright hate the mailing list format, or even web forums. I do think live chat helps a community attract people who can be helpful to it. > Freenode and its communities are the sole reason Linux is unpopular. Be interested to know more about what you mean by this? > Its one of the most dangerous places to connect to, besides online games, > some porn sites, and darknet sites like silk road. I mean come on, it was > hilarious how it was portrayed on Mr. Robot, but they were not that far off. > Even though they brought back tor support, which is a catch22 for them, > (although you would need a special tor setup, standard setups dont" work) > Recommending people go to freenode is like leading sheeps to slaughter. Again we seem to be running up against the common knowledge problem. On my own (out dated) experience the risks associated with IRC were 1) the client being vulnerable to attack (shoutouts to mirc [6], xchat [7]) and 2) exposure of your internet facing IP address. Generally (showing my age) bouncers were used for the latter and I guess (not used IRC in 5 years) connection these days would be through whonix (who even on their wiki have a footer that says "bored? join us in IRC chat"). Where IRC seems to be a bad idea, is in the fact that you can't easily get a bouncer anonymously and IRC networks supporting TOR connections is a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation for them. My ultimate feelings (and the reason I've never joined a #qubes IRC channel to date) and why I sort of agree with you are summed up in https://phabricator.whonix.org/T361 which links to the associated Tor and Qubes tickets. Slack I've never used, but am put off by the fact it's proprietary. As a major factor in having an IRC channel is "users expect it because it's what other distros do" this raises the question do other distros have slack channels? I probably agree more with Jean-Philippe (when in Rome...) you mention Matrix, looks interesting, is there a good primer anywhere on how it solves the IRC problems discussed in the whonix and tor tickets? (yes, being lazy, sorry...) Disclaimer of interest = spent unhealthy proportion of teenage years running gaming IRC channels, suffering with bad case of nostalgia. [[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/ChannelList) [2] https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/support/irc/ [3] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InternetRelayChat [4] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IRC_channel [5] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_use_IRC [6] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-189/product_id-325/Khaled-Mardam-bey-Mirc.html [7] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-552/Xchat.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/AxPj8RDfwf7hWLAkHqU1dTKV4_zlCzuvkyZkGNUgvIrzuDx-pHrh2HlGarNLKTM0J9HdFJS8qzp2lditqt4ZmSxsnnTuQ354EiKufYn939s%3D%40protonmail.com. 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