IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

The “mIRC Unicode project” was successful it seems and Khaled Mardam-Bey just released version 7.1 of his famous IRC client.

The project to convert mIRC to Unicode has taken almost two years of development and testing and has required tens of thousands of changes to 150,000+ lines of source code. This has been the most complex and time-consuming update to mIRC since it was created in 1995, when it started out as a non-Unicode, 16-bit, Windows 3.1 application.

Little over two months ago, Khaled Mardam-Bey announced in the mIRC forums that there’ll soon be a public Beta-test of a new version of mIRC.

And just yesterday the Beta of mIRC 7.0 has been made available for download and testing for users that are willing to put up with it being “buggy and crashing often”.

The new version finally has Unicode support which required “tens of thousands of changes to 150,000+ lines of source code” and is the “most complex and time-consuming update to mIRC since it was created in 1995″.

Little over one month after the last release of the popular IRC-client, a new version becomes public.

According to the website the update is due to a security flaw concerning “very long nicknames on non-standard servers” and it is therefore a recommended upgrade for everyone.

Also, it seems the exploit code for the mentioned vulnerability is already in the wild so it’s advised to update in a timely manner or deploy the following workaround if an upgrade is not possible:

on ^*:OPEN:?:*:if ($len($nick) > 298) halt

The above snippet should be added to ones mIRC’s remotes and shall then prevent the hole from being exploited.

4 days ago, Khaled Mardam-Bey released a new version of the popular Windows IRC-client mIRC

The website states: This version of mIRC is a small though important update to the previous version and has been released primarily to resolve an important issue with ‘if’ statements being processed incorrectly in the scripting language.

It continues: Although this is a minor update, it includes important changes and is a highly recommended download.

The full list of changes is as follows:

1.Fixed if/while bracket priority bug which affected the parsing of if/while statements.

“This version of mIRC continues to build on recent releases and addresses a number of issues that have been reported by users since the last release. It includes improvements, changes and fixes to a number of features”, the mIRC website reports.

“In particular, a new editbox “automatic” lines option has been added that dynamically changes the size of the editbox in a window to show the whole of your typed message, up to half the size of the window. This allows you to easily see and review a long, multiple-line message while keeping the size of the editbox small when it is not in use.”