If anyone is in a position to assist...
2600 IRC SERVER OFFLINE INDEFINITELY
Posted 18 Jun 2002 07:13:36 UTC
As a result of a massive Denial of Service attack of
biblical proportions, we no longer have a home for
irc.2600.net.
It's rather ironic that hackers are constantly blamed
for DoS attacks when they, like many Internet users,
are often the victims. We have, for the moment anyway,
lost a major forum of communications for the hacker
community. It doesn't much matter if this was
orchestrated by a bored individual or some sort of
government conspiracy - the result is the same. Voices
are silenced, communication becomes all the harder,
any semblance of community is wiped away. There are
those who will view the dismantling of our network as
a good thing and it's those people whose interests
were served by these attacks - attacks which required
no computer skills and had nothing at all to do with
hacking.
The attacks came over the weekend, around the same
time other such attacks were directed at sites like
Fox News. They, however, got their connection back and
launched a federal investigation. We would have
preferred to simply find a technical solution but we
weren't given that chance as our provider chose to
simply disconnect us instead.
Our system was kept afloat entirely through volunteer
efforts and the fact of the matter is that we have
more pressing things to worry about right now. Whether
the IRC network ever comes back is now entirely up to
the hacker community's ability to design a network
that can work around the efforts of those trying to
shut us down. If you want to help, please email
irc@2600.com. We're sorry that the net continues to be
shaped by malicious morons intent on shutting down all
aspects of free speech.
