Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
The Internet

DCC2 Protocol for IRC file transfers 233

Posted by CmdrTaco from the transfering-underground dept.
Joe_Hypnol writes "I just noticed this bit of news over at IRC Junkie. Looks like a bunch of irc client authors (and even more) are putting their heads together to come up with DCC2, a replacement for the the poorly designed DCC IRC file transfer specification. The old protocol was basically based on a usenet post, but this new one is looking like it'll be a full-blown standard. It's currently an IETF internet working draft. Read the press release at DCC2.org."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

DCC2 Protocol for IRC file transfers More

DCC2 Protocol for IRC file transfers

Comments Filter:

  • Where's IRC2? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 25, 2004 @10:56AM (#8964868)
    To replace the poorly designed IRC protocol?

    • Insightful AC post, film at 11 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:05AM (#8964931) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, that was my thought too. It's very much a case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

      The IRC protocol is flawed. Not just superficially broken, but horribly, fundamentally broken in numerous ways. As a result it's unreliable (prone to network splits), puts massively unnecessary load on servers, has problems with contention for nicknames, and so on. It really needs complete replacement.

      Mind you, now that we have XMPP, there's a strong case for just letting IRC slowly die and having XMPP chat rooms take over.

      • You forget the benefits of an open protocol (Score:4, Insightful)

        by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:40AM (#8965094)
        IRC may be ugly, but like Windows, it's here because everybody uses it.

        Its massively cross-platform-available and easy to integrate into messaging apps.. That's worth a lot more than the costs incurred by its kludged technology
      • They could use a more efficient protocol to talk to each other and route traffic and clients don't have to know any difference. Except for, well, DCC.

      • XMPP Worse Than IRC, IMO (Score:4, Insightful)

        by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @02:26PM (#8966180) Homepage Journal
        Honestly, I don't think XMPP is going to help a lot. I am not an XMPP guru, but from what I've seen it looks less efficient than IRC.

        The main problem with IRC seems to be the enormous load that is put on servers, mainly caused by using the servers to relay client to client messages.

        There is a solution to this problem: DCC. Using DCC, clients connect directly to one another, and thus spare the servers. With a little extension, DCC can also be used to implement chat rooms client-side, so that server relaying of messages is only needed for initially connecting the clients to one another.

        Of course, we could design a protocol specifically for the purpose of connecting clients to one another, and I think that would be a good idea. Jabber and IRC both do a lot more than this, which makes them, in a sense, bloated.
      • Accually, I'd disagree.

        While the protocol itself is in massive need of optimization and cleanup, it is essentially *extremely* efficient and effective.

        Coming up with a system to maintain a state such as IRC is very hard to do in the methods you describe. Avoid netsplits? How? The internet is not reliable. Thus, IRC is not reliable. You talk about this as though you know something about it, but you cannot "fix" the problems you are talking about and have the result still being IRC.

        Please, do explain
    • Its called Jabber.
      By the way, its too bad DCC2 isn't XML.
    • yea...just like there's an Internet2.

      Sadly, not all "sequels" are good. Take Batman 3 and 4 or Bush 2. Matrix 2 (Matrix Reloaded; Seeing keanu's butt scarred me for life).

      And somethings don't need sequels, like p0rn. There will be no such thing is p0rn2 or p0rn3 as p0rn is more than good enough.
    • I had the same question actually. There are only two clients I ever use - one is chatzilla, and the other is ircII. I only ever use the former when I am in X, which is not all the time... I use the latter when I am in console mode, or ssh'd into my home box remotely, which is a lot of the time.

      So as the parent poster said.... where's ircII?

    • Re:Where's IRC2? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Evil Adrian ( 253301 )
      I think we need SMTP2 before we worry about IRC2...

  • What's the best way to organize? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by turnstyle ( 588788 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @10:57AM (#8964875) Homepage
    Just curious: when a bunch of smart authors get together to hammer out a new protocol, what's the best way to come to a consensus? Mailing lists? Blog? Wiki?

  • This is good (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With all the attacks on p2p networks, DCC may be more needed than ever.

  • I got another idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by slash-tard ( 689130 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @10:59AM (#8964885)
    How about an IETF standard for warez serving bots. I hate learning the different commands for the different bots.

  • DCC2 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tiberius_Fel ( 770739 ) <fel AT empirereborn DOT net> on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:01AM (#8964903)
    Well, I for one think this will be quite good. It's very frustrating to try to DCC a document to somebody only to have it fail for a variety of reasons. I look forward to improving this standard. :-)

    On the other hand, this does improve the IRC-for-filesharing thing that I've seen... way back in the day before Kazaa, my friends used to pick up their movies etc. from IRC channels... so this will facilitate that, I suppose... possibly not what the authors have in mind.

  • I've got an idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:01AM (#8964906) Journal
    Let's dump DCC (which isn't that bad, except for the TCP ports) and FTP, and come up with a decent transfer file replacement One that doesn't need 10,000 free ports, special firewall tuning, works through a layer of encryption without problems, but still doesn't generate a lot of overhead.
    • Let's dump DCC (which isn't that bad, except for the TCP ports) and FTP, and come up with a decent transfer file replacement One that doesn't need 10,000 free ports, special firewall tuning, works through a layer of encryption without problems, but still doesn't generate a lot of overhead.

      hey! you are talking about ssh [openssh.org] - sftp!
      • No, he isn't. To be able to use ssh/sftp all users need to have a shell account on the server(*). Thus, ssh/sftp cannot replace anonymous FTP.

        (*) Though, I suppose one could have a "guest/guest" account which could not execute any commands. Still seems a bit dangerous to me if you only ever want to serve files anonymously.
        • No, he isn't. To be able to use ssh/sftp all users need to have a shell account on the server(*). Thus, ssh/sftp cannot replace anonymous FTP.

          yes, he is. the openssh source is available under the gpl. how difficult can it be to get it, and integrate it into an irc client for file sharing?
          • yes, he is. the openssh source is available under the gpl. how difficult can it be to get it, and integrate it into an irc client for file sharing?

            ...the openssh source is OSS, but it is not GPL. What licence it's really under, is left as an exercise to the reader.

            Kjella
            • ...the openssh source is OSS, but it is not GPL. What licence it's really under, is left as an exercise to the reader.

              lol :)
              you are right. anyway, i was talking about the protocol, not the implementation of it.
        • That's what rssh [pizzashack.org] is for.

        • Re:I've got an idea (Score:5, Informative)

          by undertow3886 ( 605537 ) <geoff@@@amsa...info> on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:48AM (#8965145)
          You can get a program called scponly (works with sftp too) and set that as your guest user's shell. It makes it so they can use sftp, but not log on with plain ssh and get a console. It works great for me.

  • There must be some mistake (Score:4, Funny)

    by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:02AM (#8964912)
    They revamped the whole protocol but Ratios weren't mentioned even once. Are they sure this is for IRC?

  • PIrates rejoice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:02AM (#8964913) Homepage
    Is DCC used by anyone else but file pirates and music traders? I mean really. Come on. Don't lie. Oh sure, you know a guy who has a cousin with a good friend that has a girlfriend whose brother distributes his folk music on IRC but besides that, anyone else using DCC for legit transfers?

    • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tiberius_Fel ( 770739 ) <fel AT empirereborn DOT net> on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:07AM (#8964948)
      I seriously use DCC for things other than pirating. DCC is commonly used by my particular group to pass along logs, interesting documents, proposals & updates, et cetera. In a sense you might say it's like P2P - it's used by a lot of filesharers / pirates - but it's not the exclusive domain of those types.
    • I can testify to using DCC for legit reasons. It's a very useful tool when you want to send a file to someone you are talking to.

      Maybe you should try to use your computer for something else apart from sending pirated music to your friends and you'll realise that there are other uses for file transfer?

    • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DJayC ( 595440 ) * on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:10AM (#8964960)
      Um, yeah. Just about any time I need to send a file to a friend on IRC I would use DCC. For example, "Hey take a look at this logo", or "You need help? Send me your .cc file".

      It seems like you have only been exposed to bots using DCC to send you files. You are talking about someone who distributes music on IRC or whatever, when in reality DCC is more than a means for bots to offer files. Normal users send files too... it's just like sending an email attachment.. you use those don't you?

      • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:4, Insightful)

        by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:26AM (#8965030) Homepage
        It seems like you have only been exposed to bots using DCC to send you files. You are talking about someone who distributes music on IRC or whatever, when in reality DCC is more than a means for bots to offer files. Normal users send files too... it's just like sending an email attachment.. you use those don't you?

        If I want to send a file, I am going to use a better method than DCC. Once again, we have the 1% trying to parade around as the majority. Don't insult our intelligence here, a vast majority of the files transfered by DCC are pirated. You log files aren't the size of DVD rips unless you don't know how to get things working.

        • If I want a config file from someone in a project discussion room I'd only ever use DCC, unless they could post an URL to somewhere I could download it; nothing is more anonymous. Too many people log channels for it to be safe to wantonly pass e-mail addresses about on IRC.

        • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )
          If I want to send a file, I am going to use a better method than DCC. Once again, we have the 1% trying to parade around as the majority. Don't insult our intelligence here, a vast majority of the files transfered by DCC are pirated.

          And what "better method" of sending files would you suggest, that is not used by pirates? FTP? HTTP? IM? E-mail? Newsgroups? P2P networks? SSH? Bullshit. They're all used for piracy. And the $100,000 dollar question, if it's that much better, why aren't the pirates using it as
          • My, my aren't we a little defensive. Did I make a moral judgment about piracy? All I said that the majority of the transfers done via DCC are for pirated files. So far, all I have heard is, "Yea, so, other people pirate through [insert protocol here]". I never said that improving the protocol would make one "responsible" for piracy. All I said that pirates would "rejoice" from the improvement.

            Why do people have an issue with honesty? DCC is used mainly for piracy -- oh yea, that and "log files".

            • All I said that the majority of the transfers done via DCC are for pirated files.

              You're probably right, and normally I don't feed trolls like you, (I've been reading up un the thread), but where's your proof? If you don't have direct proof, where is your source?

              Perhaps you just took a blind guess, and therefore are full of shit because you didn't do the research before you made your claim.
            • Just to clear something up, I said "logo", not "log". You keep using the "log file" as a joke, but it's not what I said. I was referring to the many times I need to send logos to people I talk to on IRC for various reasons. It's faster to just fire it over with DCC than to post it somewhere, or email it. The same with PHP scripts, or any kind of file really..

              You may be right that most of the BANDWIDTH is taken up by some type of pirated file, but I doubt the same holds true as far as the overall NU

        • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:2, Insightful)

          by pomac ( 159163 )
          Is there any filetransfer protocol around that ISN'T used for sending just about anything?

          Otoh, dcc isn't as efficent as some, it has size limits which some doesn't have. IMHO if someone wants to download shitloads of things they either
          a, use a efficent protocol for it
          b, go where there are alot of users

          Irc fullfills b.

          But irc isn't Direct-Connect. It's not p2p either.
        • Well obviously, if you want to send a file, you'll use a better method than DCC because you're much better than the rest of us. Some of us don't want to fuck around finding the most 1337 way to send a file. If I'm already on irc and I need to send a file to someone else on irc, dcc is the obvious first choice. *THEN*, when it fucks up, I'll email it or post it on my website or icq it or something else. But take your head out of your ass and realize that some of us need these tools, even if the "bad guys
        • If I want to send a file, I am going to use a better method than DCC.

          Maybe the average Slashdotter will use something better, but the average non-techie will just hit mIRC's ``send file'' button.

          Back when I was really into IRC, DCC was used all the time.

          ``Hey, I wasn't here last night...anthing happen?''
          ``Here, let me send you my log''

          ``Whoa, I just found this really cool pic''
          ``Hey, can you send it to me?''

          Now, yeah, most of the fserves/bots are distributing pirated stuff (and even there, it's
        • I'm part of one percent then.

          Ironically a few days ago I had log files taking up over 4 Gs of my system too. I wish I were making it up...
        • Nobody said that there was a majority share of DCC transfers happening legally. But its a far cry from "come on, execpt for one guy who maybe shares his folk music online, nobody uses it for anything but warez." I've recieved several high quality mods for halflife over DCC, and sent just as many. I've also used DCC as a convinent way of sending someone source code or an executable. Maybe all you use IRC for is music acquisition, but it certainly does have other users, which shouldn't be ignored. Just becaus

        • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:3, Insightful)

          by CTachyon ( 412849 )

          Don't insult our intelligence here, a vast majority of the files transfered by DCC are pirated.

          A vast majority of files transferred by Internet are pirated. A friend (who just left the movie scene) and I (a neutral observer) once computed that high-level piracy (raced FTP sites and the like, mostly sitting on fat telecom links "borrowed" by otherwise legit admins -- the sort of piracy that the FBI didn't know existed until recently [usdoj.gov]) consumes about 50-75% of all bandwidth on the Internet. When a single

    • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:4, Funny)

      by notamac ( 750472 ) * on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:12AM (#8964968) Homepage
      Sure people do... it goes something like this:
      boy: hi
      girl: hi
      boy: asl?
      girl: 19/f/someplace
      boy: pic? :)
      girl: [dcc send]

      Of course feel free to replace girl with [boy pretending to be girl]
    • Sure it is. I recently got all kinds of goodies on #asterisk for my Cisco 7960 IP phone and my Asterisk box - config files for *, phone config files, firmware updates and older firmware versions for the Cisco phone that Cisco tries to completely screw you by limiting download to registerd Cisco service contract holders (the latter items may be technically illegal to redistribute, but Cisco makes you wait up to two to three weeks to get a service contract and get access to them and provides no means for onl
    • People running FServes aren't, no. But DCC transfers are used regularly by the casual IRCer. Any time you want to send a file to someone you're talking to on IRC you just DCC it.

    • Re:PIrates rejoice (Score:4, Funny)

      by gnu-generation-one ( 717590 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:36AM (#8965072) Homepage
      "Is DCC used by anyone else but file pirates and music traders?"

      Of course. It's used for sending pictures, so people can see who they're chatting with.

      It's used to send drafts of collaborative documents.

      It's used for anything that you'd use email attachments for (when the file is too big to send by email, and you don't want to wait for a carrier-pidgeon or setup an FTP server)

      It's used by terrorists to DCC blocks of semtex to each other without having to meet

      [[ Please do not feed the trolls ]] -- sorry, did I miss that sign earlier?

      IRC is a chat protocol by default, not a file-share protocol. Use GNUNet or BitTorrent or Konspire2B if you want to distribute music efficiently
    • When you're chatting privately with someone normally in IRC (/msg), your conversation is going over the IRC servers. Thus, any IRC server admin can theoretically read all of these "private" messages. With DCC chat, a direct connection is made between IRC clients so that the conversation is between these two IP's, separated from the IRC servers. Of course, the conversation could be monitored from other places then of course and then you can start talking about encryption and so forth but that's another st
    • I use DCC to send files to users who are too inept to set up their firewall because in a DCC transfer, the reciever makes a connection to the sender. I wonder if this practice will be continued in DCC2?
    • Actually, most "pitates" (especially the anime fansubs, wich seem the produce the bigger ammount of data every week) switched from DCC to bittorrent a couple of years ago..

      This announcement looks interesting since dcc was never intended as a pirate protocol, but it became the default for several years.. Now that it's obsolete again, they announce a new version.. Of course, it wouldn't make sense to just build a bittorrent client/tracker on the irc clients and call it 'dcc2'.. DCC is mostly used to send f

    • In fact UT has an IRC client built in. There are big networks (ETG, progamer) with only gaming related content (no warez at all).

  • Sooo.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:03AM (#8964917) Homepage
    does this mean i'll be able to get warez even faster?

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 )

    Why not kick in some p2p as well? If you're going to download a x00 mb file, then you might as well be a good neighbor and share some of that upstream bandwidth you've got there. And if p2p is not an option, why not just take a random OS FTP server, stuff it in an IRC client, let the initial connection go through the server and let browsing & data-transfer go through a direct connection.

    Seems to me that writing a file transfer protocol ( Where have I heard that before? ) would be like reinventing t

  • They really should fix IRC instead (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lokedhs ( 672255 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:05AM (#8964935)
    Anyone who ever implemented the IRC procotol knows just how crappy it is. Here's a few reasons:

    Nicknames use SW-ASCII, yes that's right, the swedish variant of 7-bit ascii. That's the reason [ and { are equivalent, as is | and \.

    There are no standard encoding. Most people use 8859-1, other languages use, well, whatever they happen to agree on. A number of other channels use UTF-8 which is the best solution (supports all languages) but is not supported by mirc.

    Takeovers, splits, need I say more?

    Server desync

    I don't think DCC is a problem at all. It's all the other crap that needs to be fixed. Once you do, I'm pretty sure implementing good file transfers will be quite simple.

    • At this point the only realistic way to "fix" charset handling would be to have servers use unicode internally but optionally translate data to and from other charsets for specific clients, so mIRC users can have stuff translated to their system's ANSI charset, and so on.

      Of course, characters outside the chosen charset would be unintelligible, but anyone who cares will hopefully just use a unicode-able client.

    • Implementing good file transfers has basically nothing to do with IRC. This is because your DCC transfers are peer to peer and only the initial request is passed over the IRC network. The only things sent are the host, port, and the filename. While Irc is pretty lame in some major ways (for instance, in this age, we should probably be using unicode) the crappiness of DCC really has nothing to do with that.

      DCC is basically xmodem, which is a fairly lousy transfer protocol. From what I understand, some irc

  • /j #exceed

    FileBot: Offering ... Download #777 /ctcp FileBot xdcc list /ctcp FileBot send #1

    FileBot: You are in the queue...
  • will it compile with gcc3? :)

    --
    3 million strong can't be wrong
    www.MadPenguin.org [madpenguin.org]

  • Getting mp3s will be that much easier (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RLiegh ( 247921 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:16AM (#8964986) Homepage Journal
    I really, often do wonder why the RIAA (not to mention the MPAA and the BSA) has overlooked IRC for so long. 9/10ths of the channels on any of the reputable networks are dedicated to illegally distributing mp3z, moviez, warez or pr0n (or some combination thereof).

    Now, dcc2 will make all that so much easier; which I guess is a boon for the various networks' profits, but at what moral cost?

    • Re:Getting mp3s will be that much easier (Score:5, Funny)

      by huphtur ( 259961 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:23AM (#8965015)
      Shhhh! Don't give em any ideas!
    • I had a buddy get his 98 box owned a year or so ago. He found out when he received a warning from his ISP that "Someone" was considering legal action against him for sharing movies. A quick look on his box showed that there was a bot running there into a couple of hidden movies into an IRC Channel.

      Moral of the story is the MPAA at least are going through the big channels and trying to track them down. Due to hacked machines the real criminals will never be found.
    • Wow, that post was so uninformed and assuming it actually made me choke.

      1. The MPAA, RIAA and whoever else already have people/drones/bots/whatever on many IRC networks. We see them almost every day.

      2. 9/10ths of the channels on ANY network, including efnet, quakenet, or whatever are most definitely not warez channels. There are certainly plenty of warez channels out there, but if you think the recent warez group busts weren't at least in part due to irc monitoring, whether it be with clients, carnivore,
    • DALnet hasnt allowed filesharing in any respect in over a year.

    • Profit? What profit? It's going to attract more people to IRC all right, but that's going to _cost_ the networks rather than profit them. They pay for the hardware and the bandwidth, which users use for free. Not that bandwidth costs of initiating DCC sessions are that huge, but it's still some.

  • DCC isn't so good but (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:17AM (#8964989)
    It's easy to dismiss DCC as a flawed protocol. Sure it has its shortcomings, but remember, it was designed before the internet started to become firewalled to death. I remember, until perhaps 1997, DCC was just fine and easy to use, and almost never gave us any trouble. Now you have to prep up your firewall, deal with your NAT box, or get the IRC client to take care of it, ...

    Here's a quick overview of how a DCC connection is initiated:

    - The initiator's IRC client opens a TCP socket, then (let's call him Bob) sends a DCC (CHAT, SEND) request through normal messaging. Basically it's a plain-text message starting with ^A, similar to a CTCP request. Then it listens to the socket.

    - The target IRC client (let's call him Joe) gets it, decodes Bob's socket's IP address and port inside the DCC request, and tries to initiate a TCP connection to Bob.

    - Once the connection is established, if it's a DCC CHAT, text is sent as-is across the TCP connection back and forth. If it's a DCC SEND, then the file transfer protocol is used over the connection.

    Of course, the confusing thing for people who aren't familiar with DCC is that it's the initiator's client that temporarily becomes the server for the contacted client, and not the other way round, like most people are used to, with http for example. So basically, it's people who initiate DCC connections who must open one or more inbound TCP ports in their firewalls, and configure their IRC clients to limit themselves to using those ports.
    • FINE?

      It doesnt do ANY crc checking. Just try sending a few files..stopping them..then resuming them. Do a diff and its pretty much sure that one of them will be corrupted.

      Its a damn pain in the ass.
    • It's easy to dismiss DCC as a flawed protocol. Sure it has its shortcomings, but remember, it was designed before the internet started to become firewalled to death.

      It was also designed when Internet pipes were a lot thinner and far more overloaded than they are today. One major university in Sydney (UTS) had a 48kbit pipe for the entire campus. The network was also a lot less reliable - dropped packets were commonplace. When sending a file at full speed over this kind of network, you had a greater risk o

  • A group of IRC client programmers announced today they are working on a new direct connection protocol named DCC2 of which the draft can be found here.

    "The DCC2 community, a group of leading IRC client developers, today announced an initiative to create standards that will make establishing direct connections between IRC clients easier. The group will also work to standardize the protocols used to transfer files and text messages between clients once a connection has been established, allowing for a simple

  • No mIRC support? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @11:38AM (#8965084) Homepage
    Like it or not, pretty damn many use mIRC. Under community members, there's noone from mIRC there. I would hope that is temporary, because DCC really could use replacement. I'm now firewalled off with no incoming ports, two years ago I was NAT'd with no incoming ports.

    It leads to extremely stupid things like being able to recieve but not send, even though it is obviously possible since once the connection is established, the data should be able to flow either way. The other big alternative is FTP, which also is horrible at dealing with passive mode.

    The hilarious part is that the reason corporations, universities etc. seem to give for it is p2p - when they get around this trivially. On a network, someone will be active and there's no problem. You're only being a major pain in the ass for me when I want to do something with a friend that also has no open incoming ports.

    Kjella

  • As an IRC Admin... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dunarie ( 672617 ) * on Sunday April 25, 2004 @12:03PM (#8965219)
    As an IRC Admin, all I have to say is, just fucking wonderful, all IRC needs is a better file transfer method, to bring in more scum, and drag IRC down even more. IRC Stands for Internet Relay CHAT, and while it's nice to have a way to transfer files (like on most IMs), it's gotten out of hand, and it's doing nothing but hurting us chatters on IRC. I like Kazaa, WinMX, and the like as much as anyone else here, but I also love being able to chat on IRC.

    When I tell people I use IRC, more and more people say something along the lines of "yeah, much better than kazaa" or "I could never figure it out, so I still use kazaa myself", it's quite sad. ISPs hate IRC, and it's hard to find any that will let you host IRC servers, if not because of it's rep for illegal MP3s, warez, ect, it's cause of the DDoS attacks IRC attracts because of the extra scum file transferring brings.

    And now they want to improve DCC, JUST FUCING WONDERFUL!

    • Re:As an IRC Admin... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by liquidsin ( 398151 ) on Sunday April 25, 2004 @12:37PM (#8965400) Homepage
      How is dcc bringing down irc as a whole? The only large scale filesharing I ever see on irc is on small networks, usually set up explicitly for filesharing. Even when it's on a major network (efnet, dalnet, undernet) if you're an admin and it pisses you off that much, k-line everyone in a filesharing channel and you'll just be helping your network (more room for chatters to connect). As for the actual file transfers, they don't have any effect on your network. They're sent straight from client to client without the network routing anything more than the original negotiation of finding each other.
    • Yes, in the old days IRC *was* about chat. but as time went on, it morphed into more of a file-trading network.

      'chat' has moved more to the traditional IM networks, for various reasons.

      Hey, things happen, things change. Remeber the old BBS's? Nothing stands still.

      • Re:Time has moved on (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Garak ( 100517 )
        Depends on what town you grew up in....

        My home town of 8000 people has to be the IRC capital of the world with 100's of people chating on IRC at anyone time. It started way back in 96 and the channel is still going strong today. Best of all its pretty damn stable, its been years since there has been a conflict. Back in the day I must admit to taking the town channel on several occations.

        IRC is still being used by chat by isolated groups.
    • As a Post office worker, all I have to say is, just fucking wonderful, all the post office needs is a better package delivery system, to bring in more scum, and drag the post office down even more. The post office is for writing letters, and while it's nice to have a way to send packages (like on most letter carriers), it's gotten out of hand, and it's doing nothing but hurting us letter writers.
  • Are they joking about the valid filenames? Essentially it's just the characters accessible with or without shift on an US keyboard. This excludes any character not commonly used in English, which seems ridiculous to say the least.

  • File name and size information ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Sunday April 25, 2004 @01:06PM (#8965623) Homepage
    The current dcc protocol isn't *that* bad -- it's very similar to ftp's protocol. It's biggest problem is that it can't work in both directions (send and receive) through a NAT or a firewall that won't let you open a listening port and have somebody else connect to it. So if you're behind a NAT, you can receive a file but can't send one.

    How dcc works: if you're sending a file, you open a listening port, then send your IP and port to the remote host via a CTCP message. The remote host connects to that IP and port, and accepts the file.

    To fix the send/receive via a NAT problem, one could merely make an extension (or just a seperate sending command) where the sending machine requests that the receiving client open a host and port and then the sender connects to it. It wouldn't be too difficult to implement, but it might require that a ctcp message be sent back from the receving client. We've been talking about this for over a decade. The hardest part would be to talk the other client authors to implemenet it.

    One other, less commnon problem -- that IP that is sent comes from your hostname in many cases, so on a multi-homed box it's often wrong. Here is a pseudo-fix [google.com] that's just under 10 years old for ircII.

    File name and size information never needs to pass over IRC", the website of the DCC2 protocol reads. Some networks have taken action against channels where music files are being shared over DCC.
    But make no mistake here -- the *only* reason one would need to avoid sending file name and size information over irc would be to avoid censorship or logging done by the irc servers. It's just metadata, and a few bytes of it -- the servers can handle it without any problems.

    In fact, it would be nice if the new dcc protocol (if it's ever completed and widely implemented, which I doubt, based on my experience with how irc stuff is done) could support sending small files directly through the servers with no additional TCP connections. It would be *very* slow (thanks to flood control -- perhaps 100 bytes/second tops) and would put a larger load on the servers, but it would allow two clients behind two different NATs to send files to each other when nothing else would. Wouldn't be practical for .mp3 files, but it would for .ircrc files. Of course, the server admins would hate the mere idea, and if people used it a lot they'd add code to the servers to find and block it, K-line the users, etc.

  • IRC is not a file transfer network. IRC is a chat network.

    So many people are using IRC for so many things that it's not built for, that it has become nothing but a gigantamongous tangled mess full of SHIT.

    The only way to save it is to destroy it. If not, eventually, it will all be taken down forever by script kiddies, such as what happened with DALnet (last i knew, they'd had a 4 year long DOS attack on them...)

    Start over. The WHOLE NETWORK. Not the fucking file transfer protocol that's hacked over o
  • 4 years ago, I was thinking of a way to improve DCC transfers across IRC by splitting up files and creating a bit torrent (before BT was around of course) style client that would send the fragment files to various users via dcc and stitch them up later. Of course it would require using specific scripts or a client/bot. I did create a simple IRC client once and implemented DCC transfers. It was easy for me to identify NAT connections on both sides that prevented DCC transfers from working properly - good

  • ...and the second part (Score:3, Informative)

    by ewe2 ( 47163 ) <ewetoo@gmail . c om> on Monday April 26, 2004 @03:32AM (#8970352) Homepage Journal

    Taco, you might want to update the story with the link to the second draft, Draft File Transfer Specification [dcc2.org]. It isn't on the IETF site yet, however.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.

Close