“This age of the Internet is like the Wild West, if all the cowboys were pathetic pasty white geeks and they rounded up D&D posters and hot pockets instead of cows.” – IRC user “Desantnik,” from a chat transcript
Internet technologies come and Internet technologies go. Deep in the seamy underbelly of World Wide Web society, however, one old-timer continues to flourish: Internet Relay Chat.
“What? IRC? That’s so 20th Century!” True, but the technology is as popular as ever. It’s estimated that more than 500,000 people are in more than 10,000 IRC chat rooms, called channels, every minute of every day. More than 8,000 of those channels are devoted to cybersex or the discussion of sexual topics, according to the Journal of Sex Research. What’s more, the system has grown over time instead of dwindling and eventually dropping out in the face of newer, more robust, more secure options. AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ are two examples of modern-day chat clients based on IRC technology (though they’re not technically part of any public IRC network).
IRC has been around since the fledgling Web debuted: The technology underlying it arose in Finland in 1988. A carryover from the computer bulletin board systems of a bygone era, IRC embodies both the best and the worst characteristics of the medium that has changed modern society more than any other development in the past half-century or so. On the positive side, it’s a free, widely employed, and easy to use means of communication. On the negative side, IRC channels can be a dark, dangerous world for chatters and a system administrator’s nightmare.
What It Is
IRC has been described alternately as a worldwide “party line” and the keyboard equivalent of citizens band radio. Essentially, it’s a structured network of hundreds of Internet servers running a specific protocol (technically known as RFC 1459) for real-time text chat. There are a number of major general-purpose IRC networks, notably Undernet (www.undernet.org), EFnet (www.efnet.org), IRCnet (www.ircnet.org), and DALnet (www.dal.net). QuakeNet (www.quakenet.org) and GameSurge (www.gamesurge.net), two of the newer and most popular IRC networks, are dedicated to electronic gamers; another fairly new network, Rizon (www.rizon.net), is a popular spot for sex chat.
There is significant overlap between IRC and USENET, another oldie-but-goodie that’s most often colloquially referred to as “the news groups.” Both communities include their share of hackers, pornographers and horndogs, and regular people just looking for a virtual diversion. Both communities also employ their own vigorous native jargon, which seems to beg its own dictionary, at least for newbies.
Major IRC servers typically are maintained just for that single purpose, because they’re subject to a phenomenon known as “flooding.” Flooding occurs when too many chatters try to log in to a single server at one time, slowing down processes or killing the server entirely. Although it’s possible to run both IRC and graphical Websites on the same machine, most system administrators don’t recommend it. If a malicious individual decides to aim a bot attack at an IRC operation that shares space with other Net-related activity, the entire operation can go down in minutes. Bot attacks, or phantom clients logging on simply to tie up available resources, are easy to initiate over IRC due to security holes in the system and the all-too-human desire of unsophisticated computer users to get something (usually an infected file) for nothing.IRC also is bemoaned by many network administrators because it is bandwidth-intensive due to the huge volume of real-time chatters.
In order to connect to IRC chat rooms, users need specialized software applications, or “clients.” Far and away the most popular client for Windows operating systems is mIRC (www.mirc.com), which, coincidentally, also is the oldest. It’s now in version 6.x, and has undergone several radical changes in coding during its lifetime (primarily to support newer OSes). The current version includes a number of bug and security fixes, as well as improved support for scripting and some commands specific to the IRC experience. The top Macintosh client is Ircle (www.ircle.com), which comes in three “flavors” depending upon the age of the Mac on which it will be installed. BitchX (www.bitchx.org) and ircII (ircii.warped.com/pub/ircII) are popular among Unix and Linux users. mIRC and Ircle are shareware (each costs $20 to register after a 30-day trial period), while ircII and BitchX are freeware.
Although installing and using an IRC client are relatively simple, actually chatting in the medium can be daunting for newbies. Not only does it require a certain familiarity with IRC’s own unique lexicon (which is picked up fairly quickly by most new users), but finding an appropriate channel could become a user’s life work. There are tens of thousands of public and private channels out there, each on its own server somewhere in the world and dedicated to its own topic. The entire range of human interests, ideas, and issues are represented in IRC channels, and nothing is so obscure or bizarre as to somehow have been overlooked in channel creation. The challenge can be finding a spot in which one feels “at home” – and one in which there aren’t so many other chatters that getting involved in the conversation is hopeless.
All IRC channel names begin with the “pound” sign (#), and some are evocative of their subject matter: #anime!, #30plus, and #comics, for example. Others, however, seem named at random: #chat, #!!Platty!!, and #sumu, to name a few, although stranger ones exist. Adults-only channels run the gamut, too: #sex, #club_amor, #xXx, #adult_fileshare, #pornozx, #pornland, and even #snuffsex. To complicate matters even further, any IRC user can create his or her own new channel any time he or she wishes simply by connecting to a network and naming the connection, and then remaining online until someone else joins the channel. As long as someone is in the channel, it remains “live.”
IRC, much like spam and pop-up windows, is an Internet adjunct people either love or hate. Some love it and hate it at the same time. “IRC can be a source of great knowledge, anonymous file sharing and software pirating, text-based games, and entertaining chat if you know where to look,” says a chatter known as Whiteknight. “Ninety-five percent of all servers and chat rooms are either useless or infuriating, or simply obnoxious.”
Chatter Kurisuchanrin couches his feelings in more tongue-in-cheek terms: “It’s a place where broken and odd people gather to get drunk in a flood of text and insanity.”
What It Isn’t
Despite the popularity of the medium, most IRC chatters agree that many chat rooms are not a place to go if you’re looking for anything other than amusement. The anonymity of the medium lends itself to deceit and intrigue, among other things. Research abounds indicating that perhaps one in 100 chatters represents himself or herself in chat exactly as he or she is. Advice is given freely in the channels, although often it’s not trustworthy. Stock-trading advice is particularly troublesome to governmental regulators worldwide. In one well-publicized case, an Australian man was banned by the court from giving stock tips in IRC channels after he was determined to be spreading “false and misleading news about stocks to investors on his Stocktracker.com.au Website and an IRC channel called ‘#daytraders,’” according to an article published at Newsbytes.com.
There’s also a voyeuristic, Jerry Springer-esque atmosphere to much of IRC. Such was the case in January 2003 when 21-year-old Brandon “ripper” Vedas of Phoenix, Ariz., ingested large doses of narcotic drugs and drank alcohol until he passed out and died. The whole sad episode was broadcast live by Vedas’ Webcam and captured in an IRC channel in which he was an active participant until the bitter end. Some of the other chatters tried to talk him out of it, some urged him on, and one even called for emergency help in the real world. None could turn away from the spectacle, though a few expressed concern that “shit is going to hit the fan soon” and they would be in trouble when the server’s logs were analyzed.
Of more concern to many is that although IRC has legitimate uses and users, a certain percentage of the networks is dedicated to illegal activities. The notorious “Wonderland” child porn ring was hidden inside an IRC server, according to the authorities who busted it. Many of the participants communicated and swapped files via IRC. A year earlier, in 1999, German police used IRC to locate suspects during operation “Bavaria,” and U.S. authorities employed IRC to bust suspects in “Operation Artus,” two other large child-porn stings.
The darker side of IRC isn’t limited just to child porn. Certain channels are well known as hangouts for hackers who use them to trade malware code and challenge each other to bigger and meaner acts of defiance. Many of the most destructive outbreaks – worms with names like World Cup, Shakira, Britney Spears, and ILove You – were designed not only to infect victims via the more common avenue of e-mail, but also through IRC clients. In fact, anti-virus company Trend Micro warned that IRC distribution was one of the top trends in malware during 2002, and the company thinks the situation will worsen.
IRC channels traditionally also are havens for illicit trading of all sorts of copyrighted material, from software programs to pirated music and movies (colloquially known as “warez”). Perhaps the most notorious of the warez operations, DrinkorDie, was broken up in 2001 after engaging in about $50 million-worth of copyright infringement in the space of six years.
“‘The scene’ [warez trading] is technically organized crime,” DrinkorDie member and convicted warez trader Chris “BiGrAr” Tresco told Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) during a jailhouse interview about the group in late 2002. “If I had to do it over again, I would absolutely not get involved….”
Tresco’s cautionary words haven’t stopped the practice, though. “Many people use Kazaa for file sharing, but they don’t realize that IRC is the better way to do things,” chat vet Whiteknight says. That’s because in addition to its text chat mode, IRC also allows the transmission of fairly large files directly between users without burning a server’s resources.
Whiteknight is one of many IRC regulars who labor under the mistaken impression that IRC exchanges are “protected by law against government searches.” If anything, law enforcement has been more active in IRC chat rooms since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, than at any time in history. The New York Times recently noted that “technologies such as Internet relay chat (IRC), Web-based bulletin boards, and free e-mail accounts are enabling extremist groups to adopt a structure known as ‘leaderless resistance,’ according to an unclassified document published Nov. 10 by the [National Infrastructure Protection Center],” and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken a serious interest in them. One of the ballyhooed capabilities of the agency’s much-maligned CARNIVORE electronic surveillance system, in fact, is the ability to “track and trap” suspects through IRC.
Where Does It Fit?
Although surfers love the porn-heavy public IRC channels and some mainstream Websites maintain their own channels for discussions related to their content (hobbies, games, politics, etc.), IRC has fallen from favor with the commercial segment of the adult Internet. Online radio shows that offer a text-chat component, like YNOTradio (www.ynotradio.com), often provide an IRC option, but the majority of chatting is done via a browser plug-in or a Java applet.
“We offer a Java chat client that you can run in your Web browser as well as any other IRC chat client that you want to use by linking the ‘IRC chat’ button to a standard protocol,” says Bob “YNOTBob” Rice, president of YNOT Network LP. “Largely what we find is that as common as IRC is, there are very few Webmasters who have an IRC client already installed on their computer. Out of all of the listeners that do log into chat, about 80 percent of them use the Java browser-based client. The other 20 percent use some other client installed locally on their computer. It’s anybody’s guess as to why so few people use their own IRC client, but I’d say for those not into dealing with the whole text command line-based nature of IRC that it’s just easier to use a pre-configured Java client on a Web page.”
Noted adult Internet personality Aly Drummond, who runs her own Internet radio show at AlyTV.com and has spent years guesting on and participating in others’ shows, says, “I’ve never, ever, ever, ever, ever used IRC. I can’t see any logical reason to do it.
“When we were setting up AlyTV, I asked the tech guys at Channel 1 Releasing – who do all the server stuff – what we should do about chat,” she continues, chuckling. “Should we use IRC? Their response was, ‘Good lord! Nobody needs to use IRC!”
Dan Hogue, president of content producer CamZ Inc. (www.camz.com) says his company used IRC technology as the chat component of its live shows for several years, but recently switched to a Flash-based chat. His company’s concerns were more technical than convenience, he says: “IRC has some big issues. It’s easy to flood, easy to hack. There are some security problems.”
Still, “When we started out IRC was the most widely used and reliable technology around,” Hogue continues.” so that’s what we started out using. Honestly, it was really good when we had 50 users in a [live] show, but now that we’ve got 500 to 600 people in a show, it’s not robust enough.” The proprietary IRC client the company was using also gave the server administrators headaches, he notes. “Every time the developer made an update to the software, users’ browsers or our servers would stop responding,” he says. “The IT guys had to go in and delete all the old code before the new code would work. Now we use a Flash chat from Macromedia. Almost everybody already has the Flash plug-in in their browser, so it’s easier and works better for everyone.”
Some in the adult industry still use the technology, and apparently successfully, however. Camwhores.com, for example, promotes its IRC chat rooms with snippets of conversation on its homepage. Smaller, independent operators make use of IRC in other ways. Amateur Web girls and guys make use of the public IRC channels devoted to cybersex for marketing their personal Websites by chatting up other users and sometimes sending “teaser” image files that contain their URLs. Although that may not be the swiftest route to profitability, one new amateur Web girl who asked not to be identified said she often hangs out in IRC channels when she’s not doing something else. She has managed to drum up at least a little business that way.
“It’s time-consuming,” she says. “For every 50 guys you chat up on IRC, maybe one will visit your Website. There’s got to be a better way.”
An IRC denizen who asked to be identified only as “Jack” said he’s visited several Websites girls in IRC told him about. “If I like the girl’s pic, I might check her out further,” Jack says. He’s doing that less frequently now than he used to, though: About six months ago someone saying she was a “hot chick” sent him a file containing a virus. “[My AV program] caught it,” Jack says, “but since then I really don’t let just anyone send me files. I turn down way more than I accept.”
