NOTICE TO ANYONE STILL LISTENING

You don't know us. that's the idea. we are älä panikoi, we do not exist, and it saves enormously on paperwork.
in 1994 somebody propped a door open and went to lunch. the door is still open. we know because it still answers, on a line nobody remembered to cancel, belonging to an administration nobody remembers electing.

• irc.aikaliitto.ak — or 87.58.144.157, which is the same place and rather more cooperative
• port 6667, plain — or port 6697, TLS
• password: dontpanic

Take either door. The encrypted one is politer. The plain one is how the place was built to be heard, and there is an argument — we have had it at length, and lost — that a protocol from 1988 ought to arrive unwrapped or not at all. It was invented in this country, which the aikaliitto regards as a coincidence and we do not.

Now, about that address.
.ak is not a top-level domain. we checked, twice, because the first time we assumed we had made a mistake. the aikaliitto did apply. The paperwork went to ICANN in a year we have not been able to pin down and has been pending ever since, on the stated grounds that the applicant does not currently exist. The aikaliitto's position, filed in triplicate, is that existence is an administrative formality which it fully intends to complete on schedule, as part of a five-year plan now entering its thirty-third year.

Until that is resolved the name resolves for nobody. Use the numbers. Numbers are older than committees.

If you take the encrypted door, your client will object to the certificate at length and in red. it is not lying. the signing authority does not exist either, for the same reason and under the same paperwork. You will have to decide to trust it anyway, which we are told is the entire twentieth century compressed into one dialog box.

You will want a name you can live with, and you will want it registered the moment the place asks. It is scrupulous about paperwork and wholly indifferent to people. An unregistered visitor is not a visitor. It is weather.

Something in there answers when you talk to it. It has been at that desk a very long time. be polite to it or don't. It files you either way.
We would tell you what is on the other side, but we have only been as far as the corridor, and the corridor was already more than we wanted.

Don't panic. That is the best advice ever printed, and, as it happens, Also the password.

— äp