Then download mIRC. mIRC is the creation of Khaled Mardam-Bey, an enterprising young Brit. mIRC has been around for years, and is the chat client of choice for most hardcore internet users.

mIRC is basically a user-friendly interface for using IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The basic theory behind IRC is that in the most basic setup, a server relays messages between all the users connected to it. The server will have lots of "rooms" on it which you can join and participate in conversations. You send a message to the server, it sends it to all the people in the room.

In the more compex scenario, there are loads of servers all linked together so people from different geographic locations can chat to each other without massive delays due to slow internet traffic.

Enough of the techspecs.

mIRC is a very easy to use bit of software which takes the technicality out of IRC. The complete beginner can download it and be chatting within minutes. It comes pre-loaded with a huge list of servers which you can chat on, and comes with very detailed help documents.

For the more advanced user it is equally useful, allowing you to send and recieve files from other users, set up a fileserve allowing friends to choose what to download from your computer while you're away from the computer. It allows you to set up scripts which can interact with your mp3 player, run other software, and do pretty much anything.

There are thousands of add-on scripts that are freely available for download from places such as mircx.com and so on which can customise your mIRC.

A word of warning for the uninitiated though. While a script may look really cool, there is also a lot of potential for a rogue script writer to put in a backdoor into the script allowing people with the know-how easy access to a fileserve or something like that. Having uploaded a trojan horse virus they could then execute it by using the useful /run comman
d in mIRC.

A few years back when mIRC was in its infancy, there was a rapid propogation of mIRC worms which were script.ini files altered so as to allow rogue usage by other users. It was self replicating and would send to anyone in the room at the time with the infected person. It was a simple thing to get rid of, and simple to solve - mIRC then came with the default download directory as /download instead of in the root directory where .ini files were automatically incorporated when the program ran.

Nowadays I'm sure the scripts are much more sophisticated, and even to the trained eye a small line of code could go unnoticed, so be wary of scripts if they start doing something strange.


Ken