History
freenode began as a 4-person Linux support channel called #LinPeople on EFnet, another IRC network. By 1995 it had moved from being just a channel to its own network, irc.linpeople.org. In early 1998 it changed to Open Projects Net (OPN) with about 200 users and under 20 channels. The OPN soon grew to become the largest network for the free software community, and 20th largest in the world. In 2002 the name changed to freenode and the Peer-Directed Projects Center (PDPC) was founded. PDPC was a registered IRS 501(c)(3) charity from 2002 until approximately 2010, during which it received support from such organizations as the Linux Fund in 2007.
On June 24, 2006, a user with the nickname "ratbert" gained the network privileges of freenode administrator Rob Levin (lilo) and took control of the network. It is likely that approximately 25 user passwords were stolen as a result. This user proceeded to K-line many freenode staff members, and most freenode servers subsequently went down for several hours.
Around the 30th of January, 2010, a new attack was discovered on freenode that had never been seen before in the wild. The Internet troll organisation the Gay Nigger Association of America, famous for the shock site Last Measure, created a piece of JavaScript that caused users of Firefox, as well as SeaMonkey and Mozilla to silently connect to freenode and flood it. This exploit used an ability of Firefox to submit web forms to a port other than 80 (the default HTTP port). Whilst Firefox developers had blocked most ports some time ago, port 6667, the port for IRC, was not blocked.
Read more about this topic: Peer-Directed Projects Center
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