IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Developer Sputnick of the Quassel project just posted an announcement for version 0.6.1 of their IRC client.

Quassel IRC client Logo

In case you wonder where the announcement of 0.6.0 went, he writes that they skipped it because “shortly after tagging, we’ve discovered two serious bugs in that version. One could make the monolithic client try to select the PostgreSQL backend rather than SQlite; the other would lead to a crash on startup in some setups”.

In the announcement, he cites the following as the most notable new features:

The Quassel IRC project – “a modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client based on the Qt4 framework” – has released a bugfix release of their IRC client which is now available as version 0.5.2.

This bugfix release mainly contains “build system fixes for recent versions of KDE and Qt” and “some issues with netsplit handling have also been fixed”. A bug that made the menu-bar vanish has been fixed and if you are affected you now can “use the context menu on the chatview to re-enable it”.

Today, Quassel announced their release of version 0.4.0:

The Kubuntu-supported client’s 0.4 branch has a number of major upgrades, including:

KDE Integration: Quassel can now be integrated into KDE4, allowing for your style and color schemes to be picked up by Quassel correctly.

UI and Feature Overhaul: Plenty of minor improvements here, such as context menus, URL hyperlinks, colored nicknames, paste warnings and much more.

Streamlined Monolithic Client: Big improvement over the original core + client combined binary.

Facelift: Quassel are happy to brag that they have a complete makeover appearance-wise, courtesy of Nuno Pinheiro (from Oxygen).

Another day, another IRC client vulnerability…

Researchers have found a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the Quassel IRC client.

Quoted from the projects homepage:

Well, looks like 0.3.0.2 was not the last 0.3.0 release after all. coekie found an issue with CTCP handling in Quassel Core that allows attackers to send arbitrary IRC messages on your behalf. This issue is present in all versions prior to 0.3.0.3 and Git older than October 26th (rev. d7a0381).

Details on the vulnerability are provided on the webpage of the exploits author: