IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

ShadowIRCd, a project that died off in 2004, has been revived and is now based on the charybdis IRCd.

The IRCd, formerly based on IRCd-Hybrid, brings a whole lot of features and enhancements that can be considered useful for opers and users alike.

New features include lots of user & channel modes like the implementation of usermode +C (blocks CTCPs) and +G which prevents users from messaging you “unless you’re both on at least one channel together”. Usermode +V prevents users from getting invites from others, to which coder jdhore says that “as far as I’m aware no other IRCd has”.

DMDirc, a free and open source IRC client written in Java, just announced the availability of a new version of their client.

DMDirc 0.6.3 Channelview

This release, 0.6.3, introduces lots and lots of new features and improvements.

The DCC plugin has had a “particularly silly bug which rate limited all DCCs to 10KB/s in past versions” as well as a few other misc bugs.

Channel & URL links now work better since a few extra characters are now parsed correctly which would’ve broken them before.

The InspIRCd team brings us another fresh release of the upcoming generation of their IRCd – InspIRCd 2.0 beta4.

The features and enhancements that are introduced with the new branch are huge and tops those available in the 1.2 stable branch in every aspect.

And just as in the stable version, every feature, every mode and every module can either be enabled or disabled – customize your IRCd the way you want it.

The features the team ponders to implement are listed on their Roadmap page in their Wiki – a list with already programmed features can be found here.

In a posting on the UnrealIRCd project website, coder Syzop announced a module that can help mitigate and completely stop the so-called “Firefox XPS Attack” (NSFW link).

The attack, which exploits the fact that malicious JavaScript can send arbitrary data to a wide range of ports, gained publicity when it was used against the freenode network over a period of a few weeks.

Even though the Mozilla project has a blocklist of ports that are specifically not allowed to be communicated to, the port commonly used by IRC networks (6667) was not on those lists.

The charybdis IRCd, an IRCd that “started as an evolution from ircd-ratbox”, is now available as version 3.2.0.

The new release has loads of feature enhancements and bugfixes, some of which have been backported from ircd-seven – a fork of charybdis that is used on the freenode network.

The actual changelog is way too long to post in full, however networks already running the IRCd probably will benefit from the fixes found in this release since there have been some unspecified “crash issues” fixed.

The download can be obtained from here or checked out from their mercurial repository here.