Honestly, I don’t know what to write. I mean, he and I never saw eye to eye on things, and we used to fight back and forth constantly, but this sucks; you’re talking to a guy one day, and the next day you find out he’s dead.

Theres nothing I can really say anymore, or really, anything that matters. I was critical of his actions at times when he was alive, and I’m not going to take that back, not that I really can. I just hope that since he’s gone now, Freenode can continue on without him there to lead anymore. I may have not agreed with his choices, but I don’t think there are any people out there that could have brought Freenode this far.

The legacy he leaves behind is an IRC network that benefits the entire FOSS community, and I think that he should be remembered for this for a long, long time.

Rest in peace, old friend.

The attack was perpetrated by user named Jmax, who is a member of Bantown. For those that have never heard of Bantown, think of them as the GNAA on steroids.

So, Jmax somehow acquired the ircd.conf from one of the volunteer servers (presumably the admin of that machine sent it to him), which contains the password hashes for all the oper accounts, including Rob’s.

Now, a one-way hash produced by MD5 is quite useless. You can get the password out of it, but it requires a lot of CPU power to do, as you have to guess every possible combination that fits the hash.

One of the Bantown members claims they have access to a giant Cray machine deep in a research facility somewhere that has 2048 CPUs, in addition to a few racks of dual Opteron machines. If this is true or not, I don’t know… but it does explain how they cracked it so quickly.

So, getting on with the show, Jmax cracks the hash, and notices one gigantic security flaw in Rob’s oper account… mainly that it uses levin@* as the hostmask. For those that don’t get hostmasks. Now, normally, this should be levin@*.isp.he.connects.to.com, so at least Jmax would have to compromise a computer that matched that hostmask.

Jmax logs into lilo’s oper accounts, and then proceeds to /squit and otherwise delink the entire network, /kill half the network, and set new topics for a bunch of big channels. He also delinked services and/or compromised hundreds of nickserv and chanserv passwords. (Which reminds me, its time to change your passwords, everyone.)

What Jmax did is basically legal according to Federal law. Will the FBI go after him? No. Jmax, Freenode, and Rob are all small fries. There was no money lost, there was no actual damage done, and stuff was fixed within a few hours.

Now, does this mean I condone such actions? No. What Jmax did was still wrong, yet unfortunately legal. Does this mean I still want to see changes in how Freenode is operated? Yes. Does this mean I still think Rob should drop Spinhome, and actually earn his pay from PDPC? Yes.

Currently, I am not sure how this happened (though I have several theories on how, and by whom), but I would like to request that this never happen again. This is a very immature way to deal with Rob’s actions, and is not solving the problem. In fact, this is probably helping to undo all the work I’ve put into trying to help the community deal with Rob’s actions.

As much as I dislike Rob, and what he does, and how he abuses his position at Freenode and the PDPC for personal gain, stooping that low to take the entire network down is something that only an idiot would do. Honestly, I hope Rob finds you and has the FBI put your ass in jail.

Update: A blow by blow account of what happened is available from Tmandry. Also, someone has taken credit for doing this, on the Slashdot article about it.

I request that anyone who is currently engaging in any such attack that they please stop. As I’ve said before, I do not wish to see the network taken down or damaged in any way.

It’s worth commenting again on my use of the IRC nick somegeek on freenode. What’s that about? Do I have two identities? Why do I need a separate nickname? Isn’t it confusing?

I have two main nicknames on freenode now, lilo and somegeek. I have two nicknames, but not two identities. Both nicknames are me.

I’ve sent up somegeek because I’m in an unusual position. As head of staff, I need to make it very clear when something is official, and when it’s not. The spinhome project is personal, not official.

So, if thats true, why is his away message (emphasis mine…)

[lilo] is away (I'm away for the moment. For URGENT freenode help (channel flooding, trolling users, network problems or access issues), please email my pager at 4iiygyvs@freenode.net . For ROUTINE issues, please see http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#gettinghelp .... Please take a look at my personal blog when you get a chance: http://spinhome.org .... Thanks!)

Also, why is the topic for #freenode-social, Freenode’s official social channel, (again emphasis mine…)

--- Topic for #freenode-social is Welcome to the Biggest 'Ol FOSS Network on the Planet, Y'all. d^) || /bin/flame > /dev/yallchill . Please, no trolling, soapboxing or astroturfing. Thanks! | For freenode support: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#gettinghelp | http://freenode.net/channel_guidelines.shtml | Let's make this the best of freenode. | Lilo's personal blogs: http://bloggage.org/ and http://spinhome.org
--- Topic for #freenode-social set by lilo at Thu Jun 15 00:17:25 2006

For someone who wants to keep his ‘work’ identity seperate from his ‘personal’ identity, he’s not doing that good of a job. In fact, it looks like he is intentionally trying to confuse Spinhome as a lilo-supported PDPC project.

Well, which is it, Rob? Work or personal?

On June 4th, Debian made a step towards that goal, and moved their official channel, #debian to OFTC, taking over 800 users with them.

Well, this anonymous staffer has told me that he believes those 2005 figures are completely bullshit. The information that I originally quoted said there was $0 in corporate contributions, but the anonymous staffer said that a company going by the name of Digium donated several thousand dollars, and he thinks the total income for 2005 exceeds $28,000.

Now, I don’t know if this anonymous staffer is correct, and I essentially have no way of checking if his facts are true or not. If anyone out there from Digium is reading this, please drop me a line so I can figure out if this is true or not. If it is true, Rob is looking at a serious charge of tax fraud.

Update: I forgot to mention, people are still looking into seeing if Rob actually gave the money to UNICEF like he promised, an incentive he used for earlier fund raising campaigns to get people to donate more (Rob said he would donate a percentage of every donation to UNICEF). According to this page, it should have been over $5,822 for the 2005 campaign alone. However, at this time, there is no proof he actually did so.

As of now, I’ve spent the last two years on freenode. I, and many others, have endured constant harassment from lilo, including a highly frequent stream of global notices begging for donations, supposedly so he can focus more on freenode and less on trying to earn a living (and who of us wouldn’t want to be paid to sit on IRC all day, but I mean, come on). He’s been seen meddling with channels, and their politics, but rarely ever seen doing actual work which would benefit freenode. Several times, IRCd and Services projects have been started to improve the network, and discontinued due to lilo’s politics getting in the way of actual implementation, pissing off more than his fair share of developers in the process, including myself, as I was naive enough at the beginning to think I could help this shell of a network be a better place, even after my own dream had been dashed.

I totally agree with Quinton, Rob doesn’t know when to stop, and ends up ruining the network for everyone else.

Well, I’m trying to double check to see if all these numbers are correct, but at this moment, I believe the values to be this (years are defined as the fiscal year ending June 30 of that year, starting June 30th of the previous year):

• 2003: +$2,548 from individual donations, +$0 from corporate contributions, -$75 in expenses
• 2004: +$9,611 from individual donations, +$4,800 from corporate contributions, $-889 in expenses
• 2005: +$18,600 from individual donations, +$0 from corporate contributions, $-4,776 in expenses, $-13,824 in wages and employee related taxes

Now, what I want to know is, since every Freenode resource is donated, and Rob is the only one who gets a paycheck from the PDPC, and $13,824 of this money has been (legitimately?) placed towards this paycheck, where is the other $15,995 dollars?

Also, since this doesn’t include 2006′s figures, and the PDPC has to file an IRS 990 because it made more than $25,000 this year, I can imagine a similar problem in relation to 2005′s numbers. So, we’re looking at about $15,000 – 25,000 in funds that, are otherwise, not being used on Freenode in any way, and possibly aren’t in the PDPC’s posession anymore.

What gives, Rob?

So, now all he needs to do is release a detailed budget on how the money was actually spent over the past year, and another detailing how its going to be spent this year, and then we, the Liberation Front for Freenodian Freedom (LFFF), might be getting somewhere.

In response to his saying that I have no proof that he’s mismanaging the PDPC for his own gain, and otherwise abusing the community, I have a couple things to offer.

First, where are the PDPC yearly budgets? Rob keeps offering simple ‘draft’ budgets, which are of no use to anyone. They are not approved by the rest of the board, and they aren’t even online anywhere. As far as I know, the law requires non-profits to have detailed budgets, that say where every last dollar goes; the handwavium going on makes me think there is something shady going on inside the non-profit. The lack of public financial reporting is not a good thing.

Second, are non-profits not required to have an Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Board? Again, as far as I know, they are, infact, required to do so. They are also required to release the logs/minutes to the public. I see no reference to AGMs on the PDPC website, let alone the logs to them, or any way to get them. Or, hell, if the PDPC even has them.

Third, the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) IRC network was started by ex-Freenode¹ staff and servers. Many of these people left Freenode because they got tired of Rob Levin’s constant network-wide notices², reminding people to donate to the network. Said money was being spent on Rob Levin’s private life, such as bills and food, and was not helping the network in any way. They didn’t split from Freenode for no reason, although Rob Levin has tried to spin it to sound like that.

Fourth, Rob Levin attacks anyone who disagrees with his methods either directly, or via third parties. As documented here, and here, he uses third parties to basically say, “Yeah, my opposition lies a lot, and offers no proof that I’m a ‘bad guy’.” Yet, Rob does the exact same thing himself. No one, not even Rob, has offered proof that anything I am saying is a lie. Infact, if someone can prove that I have my facts wrong, I implore them to include any corrections or proof in comments under any of my Liberation of Freenode posts. However, Rob himself doesn’t support such a policy, and on his own blog, he deletes any comments that do not agree with his point of view.

Fifth, Rob Levin has continued to maintain that his Spinhome project (the one to pay off all his bills, and buy him a brand new motorhome), is in no way connected to the network. He says this doesn’t enable him to better serve the network, and on his own blog he says that his alternative nick, ‘Somegeek’, is the one he uses to talk about Spinhome, as not to confuse this as a Freenode/PDPC project; but by mentioning that it is his nick, he is implying that donating money to him for Spinhome, it helps the network.

Sixth, supporters of Rob Levin say that, thanks to Freenode, he lives in poverty, as if the two have a connection. (See this comment.) Rob Levin has paid very little out of pocket for the network. As I said in my earlier post, Rob pays nothing for the server hardware, he pays nothing for the server bandwidth, and I don’t think he even pays for the hosting of the Freenode.net website. The only thing he pays for is the three domains (freenode.net, pdpc.us, peerprojects.org), and the occational other things; the majority, however, is donated. He doesn’t even pay the hard working staff, who volunteer all their time instead.

So, even though Rob wants it to appear so, I am not attacking him for no reason. Nor am I attacking Freenode at all. I think Freenode is a great network, and has a great community; but neither the network being great, nor the community being great have anything to do with Rob’s efforts. The network and community are that way because many people, from all different corners of the FOSS community, came together and made Freenode into what it is today. These same people are developers on hundreds of FOSS projects; in essence, they are the FOSS community.

_{[1]: Back then, Freenode was still called the Open Projects Network (OPN). The PDPC didn’t exist yet, either.}

_{[2]: Does anyone have IRC logs of these global notices? Please email them to me, my client doesn’t keep logs.}

Now I need your help. This is not a one man operation. I cannot do this alone!

Rob Levin continues to abuse the community for his own profit, and this helps no one; the community was not build upon these ideals, instead it was built on the sharing knowledge, resources, and information to build better software and development procedures, and to build a community dedicated to these ideals.

Not only does Rob Levin effectively steal from the community using the false trust he fostered within the community, I also believe he is commiting tax fraud, and other forms of fraud, by not properly reporting the earnings of the PDPC, and his salary as a board member.

He also owns two additional domains under the PDPC name, and is using PDPC to pay for them, but is otherwise not putting them into use, or are possibly using them for nefarious purposes. These domains are pdpc.us and peerprojects.org.

In addition to all of this, he is using his position as the head of Freenode to encourage people to donate to his Spinhome project. This project exists solely to provide him with an almost $250,000 motor home, and pay off over $31,000 of debts and bills. The PDPC nor Freenode profit from this in any way! The community also does not profit from this in any way!

If you’re willing to help liberate the Freenode IRC network, and its parent non-proft, the Peer Directed Projects Center, please contact me, either by leaving a comment on this entry, or by emailing me directly, pmcfarland@adterrasperaspera.com. Continue reading on how you can help.

What to do to help:

• The easiest of them all, is to boycott Freenode altogether, and stop using it until Rob Levin leaves the network or changes his ways. If you are the developer of a project and have a channel there, you can move it to the Open and Free Technology Community, and alternate IRC network dedicated to serve the FOSS community. There are also many other IRC networks.

• Report the Peer Directed Projects Center to the IRS for tax fraud. They have an easy to use form available.

• Ask irc.debian.org and irc.gnu.org to point to OFTC or some other alternative IRC network.

Hopefully, if everyone acts on this together, Freenode will be returned to the community that Rob Levin refuses to be apart of.

Well, isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black. Rob, you’ve been caught social engineering before. Remember that OFTC attack a month ago? That is social engineering. Posting things on your blog that are obviously not true, and people, not knowing any better, think it’s true, due to misplaced trust? That’s also social engineering. Not informing people about your current income status (which more than likely exceeds US$40,000 a year), and then asking people to donate money for your new motorhome? Social engineering, and which, that specific case may actually be against the law (IANAL).

Also, I don’t care that you’ve klined me from the network. You did so after I announced I left, and you did so as an act of malice. However, something I do care about, is that you are implicating me in the attacks against the network. How can I be on the network and present for the attacks if I am klined from the network? You, by your own admission, said that you klined me. Implicating me in the attacks, even when there is no way I could have been apart of them, is defamation.

Everything you quote that I did, such as asking many open source projects to move their channels elsewhere, is not social engineering. It is looking out for the well-being of the Free and Open Source Software community. I do believe whole heartedly that you are stunting the growth of projects; and by constantly begging for money, especially when the PDPC (your own non-profit) pays you a good sum of money each year, you are keeping money out of the hands of developers who could be using this to develop software. I am not the only one who complains about your donations runs: irc.debian.org and irc.gnu.org, among others, constantly threaten to redirect elsewhere.

Also, is it not a form of social engineering to use Freenode to collect money for the sake of Freenode? You do not pay anything for the hosting of IRC servers, as all bandwidth, and even the machines, are donated. The Freenode.net website itself could be hosted on less than $120 a year (Dreamhost’s L1 plan has upwards of 1TB of traffic a month, which I seriously doubt you are exceeding), and $10 or so a year for the domain. Yet, the PDPC is raking in the money. Just like your Spinhome project, this is, without a doubt, social engineering: you’re abusing the trust of all the users on the network, and you always have been.

Update: (4/26/06, 6:55pm) Just to clarify, that 1TB figure is only the website, and not the IRC servers. As nenolod (former ircd hacker for Freenode, who left because of what Rob does) pointed out to me, the IRC servers use about 3-4TB a month, and upwards of 16TB during an attack. However, the bandwidth the IRC servers use, and the machines themselves, are all dontated, Rob doesn’t pay a cent for those.

Update: (4/28/06, 7:39am) Oh, and apparently someone dugg my story. The description kind of sucks, and is a little flamebaity, but 11 people have dugg it, and I’ve gotten several hundred hits to this story alone. If you want to help with the on-going effort to get Rob Levin to stop abusing the community that he says that he supports, please, digg this story.

He also makes everything a political issue, constantly censors users for exercising their free speech rights (very insulting for a network founded on such a concept), and also constantly bans people he disagrees with from the network. In addition to all of this, he also blames people he dislikes for random attacks against the network.

The worst thing of all: Yesterday, he crapflooded #oftc on the Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) with a 300 user strong group as an “April Fool’s Joke”, wasting the network’s resources, and dozens of users are already quitting Freenode forever along with me over this.

I suggest everyone move their channels to OFTC instead, a network devoted to free speech and free software.