IRC and Security

[Ed Vielmetti]

In article <7753 at uceng.UC.EDU> pmartin at uceng.UC.EDU (Paul Martin) writes:

   Sorry but IRC appears to be SOLELY used for entertainment.  This is a
   poor example of how to spend the students and taxpayers money.

irc was used in the early days of the gulf war for real-time worldwide
discussion of what was happening in europe and the middle east.  seems
to me I recall a mention of it in the Wall Street Journal even.  
from what I can tell the bulk of discussion wouldn't be terribly
interesting to me right now, but who can say?

Given the absence of an internet-blessed real-time multiparty tcp/ip
based discussion protocol, I think that irc is as reasonable an
approach as any.  protocol development didn't require any taxpayers
money to fund DOE or DARPA grants.  I've heard of some innovative
applications being built on top of it.  Cost is minimum -- student time
is free, a few extra IRC bits doesn't saturate most links, and if it
gets really bad I'm sure we'd see protocol work done to minimize link
loading.

if you don't want to run it locally that's one thing, you can
rationalize that on any ground which you see fit.  but I wouldn't call
it worthless.

-- 
 Msen	Edward Vielmetti
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	emv at msen.com