mIRC is a shareware IRC Chat client for Windows. It is developed and copyrighted by Khaled Mardam-Bey. For those of you new to the Internet, IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. The IRC network is a virtual meeting place where people from all over the world can meet and talk (well, type). On IRC you meet others on "channels" (rooms, virtual places, usually with a certain topic of conversation) to talk in groups, or privately. There is no restriction to the number of people that can participate in a given discussion, or the number of channels that can be formed on IRC. As a user you run a "client" program like mIRC which connects to a "server" in an IRC network. All servers are interconnected and pass messages from user to user over the IRC network. One server can be connected to several other servers and up to hundreds of clients. If you need more information on IRC go to mIRC's www Homepages where a lot of additional information is given.
The latest info on mIRC will always be found on the mIRC website at http://www.mirc.com/.
As of 2007, Undernet is the second-largest publicly-monitored IRC The Undernet is one of the largest Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks. Network, with about 20 client servers serving 120,000 users at any given time.[1] IRC clients can connect to Undernet via the global round robin irc.undernet.org, the region-specific round robins us.undernet.org and eu.undernet.org, or a specific server from the Undernet server list.
History
Undernet was established in October 1992 by Danny "WildThang" Mitchell, Donald "WHIZZARD" Lambert, and Laurent "_dl" Demally as an experimental network running a modified version of the EFnet irc2.7 IRC server software, created in an attempt to make it less bandwidth consumptive and less chaotic, as netsplits and takeovers were starting to plague EFnet. The Undernet IRC daemon became known as "ircu". Undernet was formed at a time when many small IRC networks were being started and subsequently disappearing; however, it managed to grow into one of the largest and oldest IRC networks despite some initial in-fighting and setbacks. It is notable as being the first network to utilize timestamping, originally made by Carlo "Run" Wood, in the IRC server protocol as a means to curb abuse. For a period in 1994, Undernet was wracked by an ongoing series of flame wars. Again in 2001, it was threatened by automated heavy spamming of its users for potential commercial gain. Undernet survived these periods relatively intact and its popularity continues to the present day.
Services
Undernet uses GNUworld to provide X, its channel service bot. X operates on a username basis; a username is independent from a nickname, which cannot be registered on Undernet. As Undernet limits channel registration to "established channels," or channels with an active userbase, Undernet introduced a version of ChanFix (under nickname C) designed to work like EFNet's ChanFix, its use is to protect unregistered channels. ChanFix tracks channel op usage and restores ops if channels become opless or are taken over. Undernet also runs an open proxy scanner. This proxyscanner scans users currently connecting to the network for open WinGate, SOCKS version 4/5, and HTTP proxy servers. IP addresses hosting open proxy servers are automatically G-lined from the network. These changes were put in place after the 2001 Denial-of-service attacks almost destroyed the network and left Undernet without the registered channel service bot for months. More on http://www.undernet.org/
