- Internet Relay Chat, commonly referred to as IRC, is a text-based, decentralized chat system dating to the Internet's early days. It consists of IRC servers, which host chats and facilitate conversations and file transfers between users, and IRC clients, software that allows users to find, connect to and utilize IRC servers. IRC clients and servers are available on all platforms, ranging from Apple's OS X operating system to FreeBSD, a Unix-like operating system.
- Clicking on an IRC link inside a web browser will prompt the user to open an IRC client and connect to the linked location. For example, a link titled Freenode IRC Trivia might prompt the user to open an IRC client and connect to the Freenode server's IRC chat room. IRC links are structured similarly to HTTP links. They consist of irc://servername.com/chatroomname. The irc:// specifies an IRC link.
- Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2, commonly referred to as FIPS mode, specifies the communication will be encrypted using a standard established by the federal government in 2001, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology website. A wide variety of software uses the most recent standard, called FIPS 140-2. The standard is used in Secure Socket Layer encryption, which protects HTTPS and FTPS communication.
- Many encryption schemes rely on the FIPS 140-2 standard, but FIPS itself isn't actually a protocol with a standalone link format. For example, HTTPS links use SSL technology based on FIPS 140-2 to encrypt traffic between two computers, but the links themselves take the https://website.com format. Secure File Transfer Protocol conforms to the FIPS 140-2 standard, but relevant links take the sftp://server.com format.
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