IRC
From Cship
IRC (Internet relay chat) is an over 20 year old Internet protocol used for real-time text conversations (chat). There exist several IRC networks where the biggest with more than 50 000 users.
[edit] IRC networks
- EFnet - mainly Americas (50 servers)
- IRCnet - mainly Europe (100 servers)
- Quakenet - mainly young computer players (25 servers)
- Undernet - newest, more rules (20 servers)
With a irc client like mIRC for windows you connect to an IRC-server from your prefered network on port 6667. then you can choose an available channel or create a new one join and chat with the other guests in that channel. Provider can censor the access to IRC networks with different methods. They can block the IPs of the servers - there are not so many as you can see above and they don't change very often either. Or they can block traffic on the standard IRC port 6667 but several servers also allow connections on different ports like 6668 to bypass that blocking.
You can use a webgateway to the IRC like cgi:irc or a BNC (a proxy server especially for IRC). You can rent access to such a bouncer for about 1-5 US-Dollars/month or install software like bnc or psyBNC on your own shell account.
