On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 11:48 AM, PapaSmurf <freedried@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hello all. Hi, I believe the matter of choosing to apply masks to the people who are help channel operators or not is purely a policy matter, as the technical means already exists within Ircd to implement that; it is just services that needs to take actions to set hostmasks as desired. There might be some minor changes required to services code; however, we cannot very well submit patches or specific suggested changes on sources we cannot see. I would say the situation is unfortunate, but the _real_ problem is that Ircd is revealing user IP addresses by default, in the first place. This is historical, and reflects the fact that in the 1980 / 1990s internet, it was perfectly acceptable to reveal the IP address of end users of a service, but these days that results in breach of privacy and indeed facilitates abuse such as DoS or directed hacking attacks against IRC users. And hostmasking for the general public would address at least a major aspect of the problem, which affects or can affect many users beyond the help channel AOPs. Basically, the argument is cherrypicking helpers or opers for hostmasking functionality is not a good approach to begin with --- the protection could be extended to more users.
I am PapaSmurf on DALnet. This post has nothing to do with hostmasking for the general public. I have been assisting users, in DALnet help channels, since August/September 1998. Non-oper helpers, ever since I have been on IRC, have been subjected to packeting, DDoS, and computer invasions from annoying individuals.
-- -JH