Is IRC All Bad?
Found on Slashdot on Thursday, 20 January 2005
"IRC is often portrayed by the media as a haven for illegal activity. The author of IRC Hacks set out to find whether or not this was true. His conclusions are quite alarming, suggesting that 99.9% of IRC usage is illegal although he backs up IRC by saying that it is also used for lots of constructive purposes and is used by open source software developers." Update: 01/21 05:17 GMT by P: The author claimed it was merely 99.9% of traffic "to the top 60 channels" that is illegal, not 99.9% of all IRC traffic.
Such "researches" aren't worth much at all. Someone could do a research on the 60 richest people of this world and conclude that 99.9% of all humans have no money problems. But I think most know the truth. Furthermore, the entertainment industry will abuse the headline; they are known for messing with statistics. It's too easy to say that IRC as a whole is illegal, instead of adding the details. Why not trying to push some laws into effect which ban IRC? Well, we might see this coming...