IRC-Junkie.org - IRC News

freenode, the network hosting the channels for many free / opensource projects - who just recently announced that they have surpassed the 50,000 users mark - do have big news again.

Existing since 1995 as a stand-alone network, it’s gone through a few IRCds already - from ircu to dancer-ircu then dancer-hybrid and hyperion now.

Being in use since August 2005 now, hyperion could see it’s end-of-life on freenode pretty soon as this blog post, asking for users to get aboard the freenode testnet, might indicate.

Dealing with spam is something every IRC network had to do in the past, present or even maybe in the future.

If it is somebody that is trying to give your network a bad name, a trojan horse that tries to infect your users or just someone that tries to annoy you and your users doesn’t quite matter, spam probably has been an issue as long as IRC has existed.

Luckily, there are quite a few methods and ways to counter-act on it.

irc-junkie.org tried to get in touch with EFNet to comment on the happenings to no avail but got instead contacted by the hackers themselves.

The hackers, identifying themselves as “2l8″, allegedly killed off the IRCd on efnet.nl and relinked with their “ircd with a custom-made patch iHaq wrote just for the occasion. Amongst other nifty features it had kill protection, automatic opering, hardcoded spoof (incase anyone got in and looked at hte config files) for us (root@your.servers) and a more dynamic, yet coded in spoof that gave every connected user a host like OWNED-#.MASSIVE.2l8.OWNAGE”.

“ChatSpike is migrating to Atheme IRC Services (from ircservices 5 which we have been using since we started, 6 years ago)” Brain said to IRC-Junkie.

W00t explains why IRC Services no longer serves the network. “IRC services was and is a big influence on the IRC landscape, to me. It was one of the first packages to be OSS’d, it was actively developed over a long timeframe, and incorporated user feedback. It supported a wide range of IRC daemons, and was also one of the earliest packages to get modules support”

“EFnet has recently enabled SSL connections on a select few servers,” EFnet admin Taliz wrote to IRC-Junkie. “irc.efnet.ch, irc.pte.hu and irc.blessed.net are allowing SSL clients to connect on ports 9999, 7000, 7001 and 6697.”

The developers of the Ratbox IRCd added it to the code after continuous requests. “The option to support SSL connections is part of ratbox 3, which is currently in beta stage. Hence only a few servers support it yet, namely irc.efnet.ch, irc.pte.hu & irc.blessed.net. However irc.eversible.com is running a special solution also accepting SSL, using the older ratbox 2. Also irc.efnet.ch and irc.pte.hu are running separate ircds for the SSL clients, to not disrupt regular clients while bugfixing etc.”