Word: chatted
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...chat started quite uneventfully; as is to be expected, the questions were moderated and were mostly softballs. The problem, however, came when the heavy load of users trying to ask questions crashed the Internet relay chat server and forced CNN to restart...
Christopher Petro, who works at an Internet startup in Manhattan and had been participating in the chat under the username of "wankel," decided to put this possibility to the test. As soon as the server had restarted after a crash, he tried switching his username to "President_Clinton." Since Clinton (or, rather, the person typing for the President) hadn't logged on yet, it worked, and for a few fleeting instants Petro had the bully pulpit all to himself...
President_Clinton then told the chat room, "Personally, I'd like to see more porn on the Internet." When Blitzer reconnected a few seconds later, President_Clinton asked him, "Wolf, how about you? Are you all for more porn on the Internet...
After thirty seconds, during which Petro says he "found himself in respiratory distress due to excessive laughter," someone at CNN decided that this was probably not the President talking and banned President_Clinton from the chat. However, Petro reconnected faster than the real President Clinton could and told the chat room, "okay, that was just too much. my apologies" before he was banned permanently. One wonders how long Petro could have lasted if he had decided to discuss a more realistic topic, such as China policy or the 2000 elections. Perhaps he would have finished the rest of the chat...
...commercial websites, the prank was reported as yet another example of the dangers of the electronic age. The original story on Foxnews.com described the attack as "the latest in a recent wave of cyber-vandalism that has already targeted cnn.com," and the New York Daily News said Clinton's chat had been "victimized by a cyberattack...