5H Wiki John Heitz

5H Wiki John Heitz


Who/How/What

Internet Relay Chat

Who invented IRC?: IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox in Finland.

How is it used?: IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt throughout a media blackout. It was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War. Logs of these and other events are kept in the ibiblio archive.
What is a channel?: The basic means of communication in an established IRC session is a channel. Channels in a server can be displayed using the IRC command LIST that lists all currently available channels.

Users can join to a channel using the JOIN command, in most clients available as /join #channelname. Messages sent to the joined channels are then relayed to all other users.

What are the commands?: IRC is based on a line-based structure with the client sending single-line messages to the server, receiving replies to those messages and receiving copies of some messages sent by other clients. In most clients users can enter commands by prefixing them with a '/'. Depending on the command, these may either be handled entirely by the client, or (generally for commands the client does not recognize) passed directly to the server, possibly with some modification.

Due to the nature of the protocol automated systems cannot always correctly pair a sent command with its reply with full reliability and are subject to guessing.

Recommendation:

I would not recommend using IRC for communications for the following reasons:

1. Due to the nature of the protocol automated systems cannot always correctly pair a sent command with its reply with full reliability and are subject to guessing.

2. Because IRC connections are usually unencrypted and typically span long time periods, they are an attractive target for crackers. Because of this, careful security policy is necessary to ensure that an IRC network is not susceptible to an attack such as an IRC takeover war.

3. The protocol specified that characters were 8-bit but did not specify the character encoding the text was supposed to use. This can cause problems when users using different clients and/or different platforms want to converse.

Information Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC#Commands_and_replies