Thursday, May 06, 2004

IRC = Eeek ?

Gentle reader and Seth Schiesel,

If you were to believe this article in the New York Times, the area of the Internet called Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a den of iniquity and filth.

The first paragraph reads...
"It was just another Wednesday on the sprawling Internet chat-room network known as I.R.C. In a room called Prime-Tyme-Movies, users offered free pirated downloads of "The Passion of the Christ'' and "Kill Bill Vol. 2.'' In the DDO-Matrix channel, illegal copies of Microsoft's Windows software and "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,'' an Xbox game, were ripe for downloading. In other chat rooms yesterday, whole albums of free MP3's were hawked with blaring capital letters. And in a far less obtrusive channel, a hacker may well have been checking his progress of hacking into the computers of unsuspecting Internet users."

I've included the link in the quote, as it's the only link in the entire article.

Not even the Recording Industry Association of America (who I keep mistyping as the IRRA) don't merit a link.

Which suggests that the article is a paid for scare tactic.

Having said that, IRC is also know as "the chat rooms". Those chat rooms are the scary areas of the net which you hear about with online grooming and the like.

I've never used it, but I know it's not that bad. Ten million scare stories slowly erode confidence in the warning transmitted by the scare story.

It's all very well crying wolf, but if you want a wolf skin, or an illegal copy of a movie or album or MS software, you've just told everyone where to look.

And you are going to have a hard time finding it!

take care,
Will

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