It was a sunny August day in Los Angeles, not that David Neumann would know behind his tightly closed blinds. A can of Jolt Cola in his left hand and a mouse in his right, his blue eyes were focused tightly on the monitor of his IBM PC. White lines of text advanced slowly up the black screen. He sighed.

"Are you programming again?" It was his sister Paula's voice.

"Yeah," he muttered. He wasn't. He was on IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

"Talk to me," she begged.

"I'm busy right now," he turned around, took another sip of the Jolt Cola, and turned back to the screen. For years he had been dialing into bulletin board systems, or BBSes, but IRC was on a whole new level. When he dialed up to a BBS, he could only talk with people from its local area; visitors from other places were few and far between as calling long-distance was prohibitively expensive. But all IRC servers worldwide were connected to each other. When he connected to one, he could chat with people all over the world.

Until now.

"Mom says you have to--" "Just give me a minute."

From the corner of his eye, he saw his sister walking away, pouting. He was her age--fourteen--when he started getting into computers. Having quickly outgrown the ones available at his high school and public library, he begged his parents for an IBM PC. When he finally got one, he took it apart, methodically learning what every component did. He saved every quarter that came into his pocket to buy hardware to expand his PC. Paula wasn't interested in this at all, but he just wished she didn't interfere.

But what was happening on IRC was making him doubt all that he had done.

Most IRC servers had allowed other servers to freely join, but Jarkko Oikarinen, the inventor of IRC, wrote a program which could exploit such servers to, he claimed, bring down the whole network. He convinced most of the server operators to close their servers to unapproved machines joining, but the operator of Eris, an IRC server hosted at Berkeley, held out stubbornly. Disunion rent the air in the mailing lists and even spilled over into the chat channels where ordinary users hung out.

David began making his case on IRC.

<DNeu> we can't split
<DNeu> there will be no way we can ever reach a critical mass if we are divided
<teff> We won't ever reach a critical mass as long as we remain vulnerable to malicious attackers.
<teff> Or just 10 year old kids who do harm anyways.