Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Name & Shame: FreeBNC

Today's "Name & Shame" post digs up dirt on FreeBNC, which is a free BNC (bouncer) service for IRC users to stay connected "permanently" to their IRC networks. How IRC bouncers work is not really the point of this article, though. If you want more information on how an IRC bouncer works, you can look at this Wikipedia page.

Copying Text

Around 12 PM (noon), I saw this in #EliteBNC:
12:15 PM Channel ban set for *!*@*.freebnc.in (+b) by @EliteBNC
12:17 PM <@EliteBNC> [ROOMS NOTICE] (from Robby) If people are wondering what that ban is about... look at our website, then look at http://freebnc.in/ ...more than 95% COPIED of our website. The IPv6 ranges will be banned when possible from channels as well.
Talking to Robby later, I learned that what was actually copied from EliteBNC was their text on the website. Take a look at EliteBNC's home page, and then at FreeBNC's site. See the similarities?

If you don't feel like looking at either of their websites (and I won't judge you), here is two screenshots below.
EliteBNC's website
FreeBNC's website
Looks like there's more than just the homepage that was copied:
8:06 PM <@Robby`> IPv6 page also
8:06 PM <@Robby`> though they deleted a lot of the nets
8:07 PM <@Robby`> and the rules page... ugh

Thoughts

What I want to know, is does FreeBNC release how wrong they are right now? I can't mentally process what these people were thinking when they copied large amounts of text from EliteBNC's website. Looking up the WHOIS on freebnc.in, it looks like whoever is behind the operation is not in the United States, which would explain why they have already gotten away with this.

People should not intentionally do things (like copy someone's website) because they know that they can get away with it. Of course, morals are out the window on this one.

What do you guys think about this?