Freenode Privacy Breach Report

Just before 0900 UTC+1, there was this broadcast report of a privacy breach:

08:54 -!- ChanServ [ChanServ@services.] has quit [Killed (grumble (My fellow staff so-called 'friends' are about to hand over account data to a non-staff member. If you care about your data, drop your NickServ account NOW before that happens.))]

Freenode has a history of community communication when things go wrong. There has been only official silence on this so far. There is heated discussion on #freenode.

Direct links are broken on Planet Freenode's blog, but the article "Changes to the organisational structure of freenode" on the Staffblog seems related: https://spamcheck.freenode.net/ .

I worked with Rob Levin (lilo) back in the day, and I'm moving on from Freenode.

2 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 14.4 ms ] thread

danshearer 5y ago ↗

Mass resignations and letters about moving away from freenode to a new network in Sweden:

https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20210514121343/https://p.haavard... https://coevoet.fr/freenode.html https://gist.github.com/shadowcat-mst/998cea12794768bdb3da2d...

Kim_Bruning 5y ago ↗

That particular incident was the moment when the staff all resigned.

They had already seen it coming and had made preparations. All the important things have moved to a new domain:, see: https://libera.chat/

Once the dust settles, basically what's effectively left to say is that everything that made freenode great will be renamed to libera.chat; whilst an imposter will (sadly) be left in control of the old freenode.net name.

The story has been breaking over the past few days. Wikipedia has links to news stories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat

In a week or so, take a look and see if your old channel is back up on libera.chat .