Re: hostmangling in new ircd

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 02:22:57AM +0200, Mrten wrote:
> Om 21:04 op woensdag 24 augustus 2005, Mrten:
> 
> > Om 19:00 op woensdag 24 augustus 2005, Andy Smith:
> 
> >> Or we could decide not to mangle it at all and tell people to pick
> >> longer hosts if they want them mangled. :)
> 
> >> Thoughts?
> 
> > yeah. why mangle at all?
> 
> this *is* a serious question, not a troll.

If I don't answer in detail it's because this is the same
conversation we've had here and on staff list and in #blitzed many
times in the last 3 or 4 years.

The only real downside to it is that users can't see real hosts to
report them to ISPs, and as hidden hosts are rapidly becoming an
expected feature of mid-sized IRC networks I don't think that it's a
good enough reason not to do it.

> unordered questions:
> 
> if i, as a channel-op, want to report logs as evidence to a third
> party, i have to ask the admins for help to translate the mangled
> hostnames to real ones. do the admins really want to meddle in that?

How many times does that realistically happen?  How do you currently
deal with such issues on IM networks that don't show hostnames?  IRC
is virtually the only IM technology that shows users' hosts.

Do you want a channel mode for preventing users with masked hosts
from entering tube?  Or one that will show their real host in
channels that require their real host to be shown? (I believe irctoo
does this? will be problematic with trying to stop users being
tricked into joining such channels though)

> does dcc chat/ping/etc still work?

Yes as dcc tells the other side your own IP in a CTCP message to
initiate the chat/transfer.  It would send the wrong IP if your
client were set to get your own IP from IRC but there's no need to
do that.  Furthermore, Blitzed is probably now in the minority
amongst networks of its size for NOT using some sort of hostmasking
feature as it started being used 5+ years ago, so I think most of
the real problems are known.

> what does *the network* have to gain from hostmasking users? aren't we
> making it ourselves more difficult?

I don't believe we have many users who actually take hostnames and
report them to ISPs, based on never really seeing that happen in 4
years of being in most of the largest English-speaking channels on
Blitzed (though obviously I can't tell what they talk about in
channels I'm not in).  And in cases where they say they might like
to it's usually because of some denial of service attack anyway,
which is what we're trying to avoid.

No, usually they come to #help and ask us to sort their lives out
for them because someone called them a bad name or whatever.

Even as an ircop I would not generally bother to report IRC
behaviour to ISPs, as it is either irrelevant to the ISP or gets
ignored anyway.

What we're gaining is that we're getting ever more demands for masked
hosts and when we say we don't have the feature, they go to a
network that does, and it's getting harder and harder to justify why
we don't provide the feature.

Also in channels like the maroc ones their users are being
terrorised by kiddies who DDoS if they don't get chanops and we can
do nothing to help.

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