The German IRCnet operators have been forced to do this to point out that continuous sabotage by individuals and groups against the IRCnet infrastructure threatens the future of IRCnet and IRC as a whole in Germany.

Each one of the IRCnet servers are being exposed to an increasing amount of denial of service attacks which, as a side effect, often destroy the entire Internet connectivity for the host site. One large German server, GMD, has been forced to permanently disconnect from the network.

The operator of the GMD server explains that he sees no more sense in offering this free service to the IRC community when the whole connectivity of GMD was suffering as a result of the denial of service attacks.

The German IRCnet operators want to show, with this token strike, that the mindless vandalism of individuals and groups is endangering the whole IRC community and ultimately, the future of open Internet services in general. If this behaviour of just a few people continues it will gradually lead to the loss of a historic and popular Internet culture.

The IRCnet service in Germany is offered at no cost by a group of volunteers from German Universities and companies and has, for 10 years, been a significant part of not only IRC culture but also Internet culture as a whole.

Over the last few years such acts of sabotage and denials of service have been increasingly obvious not only on the IRC networks but now also on commercial services such as Yahoo! and Amazon.

Further background of IRCnet's services are available on the Internet from http://irc.fu-berlin.de/.

Contact: Volker Paulsen <irc@gmd.de>, German IRCnet co-ordinator.
Recent informationts regarding the strike can be found on http://www.uni-stuttgart.de/irc/streik/