April Fools Day Jokes gone totally wrong, and caught on logs.

2nd April, 2006     IRC, Rants, WTF,

So April Fools Day, has been and gone again, and a number of people are left standing there, looking like fools, either because they got suckered into another Joke, or their joke was so not funny, that it made them look bad.

Case in point: Rob Levin's "freenode is shutting down" 'joke', or as it should really be known, act of stupidity.

At 22:00 GMT, lilo (Rob Levin's nick on freenode), decided to send the following notice to every client on the freenode network (that's about 25,000 clients atleast)

[freenode] -lilo(i=levin@freenode/staff/pdpc.levin)- [Global Notice] Hmmm. You know, I could do an April Fool's Day joke, but maybe instead we should make this a group effort. Let's all just go to irc.oftc.net channel #oftc, and tell them that freenode has shut down and has repointed its servers to OFTC, and ask if they're going to be adding more facilities to handle the load. 8)

Well the events that unfolded from there, include 200 or so freenode users, joining the OFTC IRC Network, to carry out Rob Levin's 'prank'. While, this was not the 25,000 users that Rob had obviously been looking for (he did say that everyone should go and do it), the people that did join, did disrupt OFTC's network and #oftc channel for atleast 30 minutes (even tho if you asked Rob, it was only 5-10 minutes). And by disrupt, we mean that people connecting, were having difficulties, and there was also server lag, due to the great number of connects and data being sent at once.

OFTC people were not impressed and who can blame them.

You can see a log of the events here and screenshots of someone's IRC Client during the event on the following links: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

To me, these actions are similar to a Denial of Service attack. Or more so, a botnet controller, telling the bots in his botnet to go and connect to an IRC Network and flood a channel. (in this case it was a global notice, telling the not-as-smart to go and annoy people in a channel and flood - the evidence is in the logs.)

Now for a little bit of a log clipping:

<praetorian> oh, so you have no problem to next year or so, having people do the same to here? :-) <lilo> praetorian: now that you've told me, it would hardly be a prank <lilo> praetorian: sort of sounds a little angry

From this litttle clipping, you can obviously see from this, that asking if freenode minds having such a 'joke' next year, played on it, is not being nice and asking first, it seems that doing so is instead telling freenode that you plan on disrupting it's service. Come again?

The other point to note is, that Rob Levin, as President of the PDPC, and thus head of freenode staff, would know that OFTC exists, and is a rival network to what freenode tries to obtain (an open-source dedicated 'discussion' network). Thus this 'prank' can easily been seen as a way of causing problems for OFTC, under the guise of it being an April Fools Day joke. While Rob says it had nothing to do with the fact that OFTC is the rival, the question still remains, because no one will really ever know Rob Levin's reasons behind the 'prank'.

Edit: the IRC log snippet i pasted got eaten by the HTML tag monsters.