CIA.vc

» see cia.vc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The banner at the top of the page described it in six words: the open source version control informant. That is exactly what it was. A project pointed a commit hook at CIA, and from then on every push to that repository turned into one line of text in whichever IRC channel the project lived in. Who committed, which branch, what the message said, a shortened link. Nobody had to check anything. The work announced itself.

Micah Dowty started it around 2003 on a host called cia.navi.cx, as a side project. It grew the way infrastructure grows when it is free and it works. By April 2006 he was running fifty bots across thirty-three IRC networks, sitting in 370 channels in front of nearly six thousand people. By the end it was taking commit messages from ten thousand or more repositories. Subversion, git, bzr, CVS, anything with a hook. GitHub posted to it over XMLRPC.

This is the layer of the internet nobody writes about while it is running. If you worked in software in those years you had read a thousand lines of CIA output without once wondering where they came from, which is the highest compliment the category offers. I was at university in Ankara for most of its life and then an engineer, close enough to the stack to have seen its output and far enough from the English-language FOSS channels that I would not have named the service that produced it. That is the ordinary relationship people have with plumbing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the night the database went ~

On 26 September 2012 the stream stopped. The cause was banal in a way that still makes maintainers wince: a miscommunication with the hosting provider, the database gone, and no backups. Ten thousand projects lost their notification pipe in an afternoon, and the accumulated history of every commit message the service had ever relayed went with it.

Dowty had already stepped away. He took CIA offline himself in May 2011 and the project changed hands, which is how the register can say it was a decade old but under different management for its last year. Eric Raymond's assessment afterwards was that CIA had suffered a complexity collapse: a large codebase in several languages that was famously hard to install and had been neglected for years. His line about reviving it was that it is notoriously difficult to un-collapse a rubble pile.

~ onward ~

By December 2012 cia.vc was serving a small white page with somebody else's logo at the top, an outfit called Ilkotech. The heading said "Onward!" and underneath it: CIA.vc hopes to return soon. We intend to have the CIA.VC Site running soon then bring the service back at a later date. It even published the XMLRPC endpoint again so that GitHub could keep posting to it.

Nothing came back. The page sat there through the following year getting smaller each time the crawler visited: 1035 bytes in December 2012, 597 the following January, then a redirect. The domain has since passed through other hands entirely.

~ what took its place ~

Three days after the shutdown Eric Raymond announced irker, an emergency replacement built on the opposite principle: no central service, each project runs its own relay daemon and nothing can take all of them down at once. Debian's Martin Ferrari and Damyan Ivanov had already shipped KGB in 2009 on similar lines. Between them they covered the gap, and then GitHub, GitLab and the rest grew their own webhook integrations and the whole category stopped needing a middleman.

What died with CIA was not the function. It was the single place where ten thousand unrelated free software projects were visible at once, as a live feed, to anyone who wanted to watch.

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