Ad Terras Per Aspera

It seems Rob can’t handle anyone being critical about his network, or the way he runs his network. In a recent post on his blog, he accusses me of social engineering, and implicating me indirectly for attacks, and also accusses me of lying about the terms of my leaving his network.

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.

I’ve decided that I’m quitting the Freenode IRC network. The network is run by someone that is very inept at his job, Rob Levin (aka lilo), who constantly causes problems with the users of the network, and makes enemies of everyone.

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.