IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

In May 2002 the FBI and law enforcement agencies worldwide arrested members of the DrinkOrDie warez group in an operation named Operation Buccaneer. One member, Hew Raymond Griffiths who was arrested in Australia and transported to U.S.A. received a 51 month jail sentence for his part in the warez group.

Originally started in Russia in 1993 and operating from a channel on EFNet, the group quickly became a group with members worldwide. It specialized in cracking software, but also released films and music.

A possible DoS has been found in IRCd-Ratbox. This IRCd is in use on EFNet and other smaller networks.

The discovery was announced on the Ratbox mailinglist by Lee H: “We have recently uncovered a potential DoS in ircd-ratbox that could result in resource starvation of the CPU.”

The bug dates back to very early version of Ratbox, which makes it a vulnerability that is presence in all flavors of the IRCd in use.

“We have now released ircd-ratbox-2.2.6, it is recommended that everybody upgrades — the attack is fairly easy to abuse.  Details follow in the next email”, Lee ends. Since then, Lee retracted to give more details about the exploit to prevent malicious users causing havoc.

“Over the past few days, the dude who runs the ‘irc.efnet.net’ round robin decided that he was tired of running it, and removed all the servers from the list”, Doug announced on EFnet.org.  “It now only sends users to his one IRC server. Some admins were clearly upset, and one even called for the delink of the dude’s server.”

EFnet’s loosely structure allows admins to own a broad range of domains such as efnet.net, efnet.org, efnet.info and efnet.us and give them the freedom to do with the domain how they feel like.

Once the roundrobin was changed, Doug setup a new roundrobin on EFnet.org.

Napster and WinAmp are just two programs that are well known with the type of people that regurarly read IRC-Junkie, that is a known fact. What is lesser known is, that both project benefited greatly from an IRC channel on EFNet that functions as a gathering place for “professional software developers, talented college and highschool students, novice programmers seeking help and the usual charlatans and rogues that add character to the colourful world that is the Internet”, as the channels’ website explains.

An article about the channel, #Winprog, appeared today on Wired. “The IRC channel has played virtual incubator to a gamut of fledgling developers for more than a decade”, the article explains.

EFNet’s global voting body has voted to switch its Chanfix reopping service to the opensource OpenChanfix.

“EFnet has traditionally been a network of multiple implementations”, OpenChanfix coder Garion explains to IRC-Junkie. ” We are running several compatible ircd versions, and that seems to do well. When it turned out that the maintainers of the current chanfix didn’t have the time to fix bugs and add features, Beige and I decided to write our own chanfix. Apparently the EFnet admins prefer this implementation over the current chanfix, because they voted to use OCF from now on.”