So, a few years ago I was writing an IRC bot which I decided to call Bartender. Today I was checking my blog’s stats (Nothing impressive, but a good way to see what is most popular on my site, etc.) and I noticed a few people had gotten to my site by searching for IRC bartender, so I Google’d that, and the IRC Bot wiki page came up. I then saw the line:
The historically oldest IRC bots were Bill Wisner’s Bartender and Greg Lindahl’s GM (Game Manager for the Hunt the Wumpus game).
Wow, haha. This obviously doesn’t prove anything but it’s just amazing how I happened to name my abandoned bot ‘Bartender’ too.
I was in ##English@freenode a while ago on IRC and I saw something that made me think. It’s amazing how people all over the world do all they can to get on the Internet: The last free medium. Unfortunately it’s not so free on many countries including China, where traffic is censored/filtered and certain sites are banned. I still think it’s amazing when people from all over the world still do the best they can to get on the Internet. The Internet is the medium of communication that is unbiased, it does not discriminate, knows no borders or limits, and basically is synonymous with Information in our day and age. The Internet is the Information Age, it’s freedom.
The following guy, although in a country that censors the Internet, does what he/she can to get to the ‘real’ Internet. I can imagine from his perspective that that must be a nice feeling, to be able to interact with ‘the outside world’.
Names have been changed.
* the_turtle (i=the_turtle@gateway/tor/x-8c852d3a32bd0485) has joined ##English
<traffick> the_turtle: Does china block freenode? You are using tor
<the_turtle> My ISP seems to be blocking everything I want to do except browse the net or connect to messenger services.
<traffick> that’s annoying
<the_turtle> And even then, the great firewall does enough blocking to make the first part a b**ch, so yeah, I have to use TOR.
<traffick> does tor run over 80?
<the_turtle> I can force it to…I set it that way, but I don’t know if it’s required to be there to get out from my ISP or not…haven’t bothered to test it.
In case you don’t know what Tor is, check this out.
Some noob was messing around in #mediawiki at freenode and so an op did an ISP-wide ban and I got affected. I tried to join and it said I was banned. After upgrading to the latest X-Chat by Silverex, following some instructions from some kind ops from #wikimedia-ops and I now have a cloak! I’ve heard about them but I never knew what they were, basically it hides your IP Address, so now I’m able to go back into #mediawiki!
