IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

The KDE IRC client Konversation pushed out a bugfix release shortly after its 1.3 milestone which brought support for DCC Whiteboard, a collaborative drawing extension.

According to their announcement, this minor release brings quite a few bugfixes and also reverts a regression that causes “data corruption or even loss of Watched Nicknames Online lists on application quit”.

Another thing to take note of is the improvement of RFC 1459 PING/PONG handling which might have caused users of bouncers to flood the IRCd when they attach to the same connection multiple times, possibly resulting in them getting kicked off of the network.

The Atheme project just tagged version 5.2.0 of their IRC services package which contains quite a few interesting changes from the previous version, 5.1.1.

Atheme IRC Services Logo

Atheme 5.2.0 introduces a new database format called “OpenSEX” which is available as a technology preview in this release and will be mandatory once Atheme 6.0 is released. According to developer nenolod, the revised format was introduced to “remove legacy stuff and provide an extendable API“.

HostServ gained the OFFER command which allows opers to – surprise – offer vHosts to their users. All of ChanServ and NickServs SET commands are now seperate modules which can be loaded individually, allowing networks fine-grained choosing of which functionality they provide to their users.

The KVIrc project just announced the final version in the new stable branch of their IRC client, KVIrc 4.0.0 “Insomnia”.

2 months after the latest release candidate and more than 500 bugfixes from the bugtracker alone this new version now depends on Qt4 of which the developers say is “a great framework to base KVIrc on, far better than Qt3″.

Noteable changes from the last stable, KVIrc 3.4.2, are added support for server extensions such as CAPs, SASL, STARTTLS and services packages. DCC support has been enhanced with UPnP which automatically opens ports in routers so you don’t need to worry about proper port-forwarding anymore.

chaz of the Anope project announced version 1.9.2 of their services package in the development branch.

New features since the release of 1.9.1-p1 are the “modestacker” which allows setting and removing several modes by services in one line, the binary databases have been replaced by flatfile plaintext ones and an option for persistent channels which keeps BotServ bots in the channel even when it is empty has been added.

Syzop of the UnrealIRCd project just posted an announcement on their mailinglist and forums that some versions of their IRCd have been compromised and had a backdoor added which went unnoticed for quite a while.

The first signs of the compromise have been traced back to November 2009 and Syzop writes that “Any Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz downloaded BEFORE November 10 2009 should be safe, but you should really double-check”.