IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

IRC services are a software that enables IRC networks to provide channel and nickname registration, or, as Wikipedia puts it: “Services are automated bots with special status which are generally used to provide users with access with certain privileges and protection”.

One of the more well-known packages you can use for such a task is called Anope which i’m sure you’ve already heard about and today i’ve interviewed the leader of the project, Charles “chaz” Kingsley.

Hello Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi there,

The folks at DroneBL discovered and analyzed a router-based botnet that is suspected to have DDoS’ed them for about 2 weeks.

The bot software, named “psyb0t”, is the “first known botnet based on exploiting consumer network devices, such as home routers and cable/dsl modems”.

Exploiting routers is in some cases more “useful” than infecting PC’s – because “most people will keep the router on 24/7″ as opposed to their computers which “most people shut down [...] in the evening before they go to bed, or when they leave the office” nenolod writes.
In his paper (which was written back in 2006 and at that time he’s been “called looney for”) he also mentions another reason why targeting SOHO routers is a good idea:

After more than 2 years of silence the DALnet Coding Team released a new version of Bahamut, an IRCd mainly used on DAL.net.

First being released as version 1.8.5 there was a bugfix-release shortly thereafter as a bug has been found in channelmode +c which sometimes not only prevented control-characters as bold and underlined being sent but also stripped legitimate messages that contained certain arabic and hebrew characters.

We took the time to ask Epiphani – the Coding Teams Team-Leader – a few question about his IRCd and the history of it:

After interviewing the author of EPIC5, this sort of could be called a “follow-up” interview. The interviewees are the authors of amnesiac, a modular EPIC5 script.

- First, please introduce yourself to our readers so they get an idea who you are.

skullY: I’m a long-time UNIX user and administrator who works for a Silicon Valley startup.

My day job involves hating software (mainly Linux, Apache and MySQL) and I relax in the evenings by writing software to be hated.

Most of what I write is to scratch an itch, but a few things (amnesiac, nboard) see a wider release.

crapple(Zak): I’m a long-time UNIX user/admin/programmer working at a telecommunications company in Canada.

After being 5 years and 11 days in the making, there was the first production release of the ircII fork EPIC5, now being at version 1.0, in the end of December.

For readers that don’t know the project yet, the website explains a little of EPIC’s history:

EPIC is an irc client project. The EPIC software was forked from ircII-2.8.2 in fall 1994. There have been 5 generations of EPIC, of which the newest two (EPIC4 and EPIC5) are still supported and in development.

5 years and 11 days – What caused that kind of delay?