DALnetizen - Ryan

Ryan Says

I recently read the October issue concerning the DoS and DDoS issues and was quite disturbed as should anyone who would read it. I never realized just how much of an impact these people who are causing such destruction and turmoil had on SO MANY people. After reading the entire issue, I was then absolutely shocked and mortified when I viewed the gallery on the lockdown webpage.

Those people should be getting serious penalties for their crimes and I hope what they're doing comes back to them X3! I remember when I was around thirteen years old when I was first introduced to an IRC program called pIRCh. I "hung out" with a group of kids, two of which would always show me *neat* programs that could disconnect other people on purpose. I was somewhat interested because our channel had a rival channel. So they would flood, or "nuke" a certain individual from the other channel and we would all watch closely to see if he/she would suddenly quit IRC with an error. Sometimes it would work, and other times it wouldn't. It was supposedly all in fun. Over time, however, I lost interest. Unfortunately, my two friends did not.

Three years went by, and by that time they had become a problem with our channel and our group of friends in our channel as a whole. By this time they had a huge arsenal of attack programs that far exceeded what they had three years before. It got to the point where they were actually intimidating us and ridiculing us for not being as "L33t" as they were. We explained to them that we're only telling them to stop their activities and behaviour because it made us uncomfortable, and they agreed to keep it down. Another year went by and by that time they were both in the major ops of our channel's sh*t list. By the end of that year they had COMPLETELY destroyed the entire channel to where none of us could join without receiving mass floods, con/con.wav's (A CTCP send which causes the computer to "blue screen" if you didn't have a CTCP ignore on.), and hundreds of packets that caused us to get d/c from our ISP.

Our channel lasted four years, which were probably the best years of my life. Friends would come and go, but there were always a few original ops that stayed until the end. They've grown to be my best friends now, even though our channel is gone. The reason I was in such dismay after seeing the gallery at lockdown.com is because I recognized one of the criminals as being one of the friends I lost long ago to "the dark side". My heart aches for fear that what happened to our channel, will now happen to DALnet and I feel compelled to help out in any way that I can. Thanks for listening,