Gossip

Free WiFi at "Ready to Surf" includes IRC as well as Skype

Your Sniffer spent a frustrating day at Victoria station yesterday, watching The Boss keynoting a seminar for a group of wireless gurus. Frustrating because the various hotspot providers seem to have decided to block their own payment pages - but there was a silver lining with Internet Relay Chat.

Specifically, the port which Broadreach Networks opened for its deal with Skype, seems to work for all Instant Messengers. Of course, you don't have to run IRC on port 6667. I know people who use port 80, because 6667 is so often blocked by clueless sysadmin bosses. But I don't think I know anybody who has done that back to front, yet.

So the Hunky Mouse was able to sit in the Thistle Hotel and keep in touch with readers on the hunkymouse.co.uk IRC channel, and on Yahoo! and on Skype. The only thing that couldn't be done, was to post stories on the Web. Apologies on behalf of The Boss, who was equally frustrated.

All we need now, is an IRC transport for a web browser... an HTTP port on 6667?