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Monthly Archives: March 2007

Beirut and Tanks, They Go Well Together

No, no, IRC-Junkie won’t go into politics. This is about a game, trust me! The users of IRC that go back a few years might remember the game Tanks for mIRC. Development was halted for quite some time, but recently the game has gotten a new share of fans.

“It has become a success on Beirut network in early 2006 when I have included the game in my script which is used by the majority of the users. And since 2005 we reached around 18.000 downloads which has boosted the tanks players,” said Stefano, network founder, in a reaction to IRC-Junkie.

“I assumed interest had faded since every time I checked the server list recently, nobody was playing,” said Andy to IRC-Junkie, the developer of Tanks. Andy was contacted by Stefano that the game was far from dead and still in use on his network. “I suppose it was dead only in my mind.”

The game has been used in inter-network battles, such as between Beirut and Rusnet. But also DALnet and Undernet channels have came by for a small tank battle now and then.

The renewed interest have so far not led to new development into the game itself. Other then a bugfix no other development has been planned. “The only other change is that I have provided a link to the channel #games on the Beirut network.  This will allow players to find others interested in Tanks and start up a game or even play some other game together.”

Andy is almost done getting his Master’s degree in Computer Science and has little time to put into the game. “What I would like to do is make it a Windows program instead of an mIRC script so it will run faster.  I expect some day I will find the time.”

Beirut IRC Network 2nd Anniversary

The Beirut network celebrated its 2nd anniversary on the 21st of this month. “I’m glad to see it surviving two winters so far” network founder Stefano explained to IRC-Junkie. “Definitely it has become the main middle eastern IRC network today. But it wasn’t easy”. The event was celebrated in Beirut with toast, dinner, champagne, cakes and fireworks on a party with 164 people.

The network was founded after Stefano was experiencing problems on the former network of his choice Undernet. “I had a big channel on undernet.. #beyrouth with an average of 130 users sized and the channel site was 2000 members within one year only and 1500 profiles with photos.. I noticed that all these people had to do nothing with undernet but joined there just because of our friendship and atmosphere.”

As the channel grew also the problems grew: flooding, multiple users on a single IP causing innocent users being Glined, users without an ISP email so they could not register a username, etc. “So at the end I got sick of the situation, having a dozen of complaints of users everyday not able to join irc … so I thought its much better if I provide my own services and server so at least we could halt the lame ones.. And truly it has worked.”

The network is also a bridge between different cultures that are not always on friendly terms in the middle east: “I am proud and glad that on our network you may find a user with a nickname Israeli, and another with hamas for example, or hezbolla and Americans and Finnish and Germans.. and all together chatting in the same room and in peace.”

The friendly chat environment has not gone entirely unnoticed. Even an Israeli newspaper has written an article about the network.

Couple Arrested for Seeking Sex with Underage Girl

A couple from Portland, U.S.A., traveled to Woodland, Washington, to trade marijuana for sex with a 5-year-old girl, but instead ended up being arrested.

Christopher Dudley, 26, and Rhea Hamm, 22, chatted in an IRC channel of a top10 SearchIRC listed network with the father of the girl, who in reality was an undercover police officer.

After a series of chats Dudley agreed with the ‘father’ to have oral sex with the girl and to make photos. Also his wife would take part in the abuse. In a chat Dudley told the ‘father’ he told Hamm before the marriage of his “fetish”, “but she said she loved me and didn’t care what I was into.”

In telephone contacts following the chats Dudley said the couple wanted to get a daughter to life the “lifestyle”, as they call it.

“This case shows the extraordinary lengths some adults will go to sexually exploit innocent children,” said Mike McCool, working as deputy special agent at the Seattle office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Court documents show that Dudley sees himself as a “decent” person with a “weird” fetish. The maximum sentence for crossing a state border in order to have sex with an under 12 is life in prison.

AustNet Admins Split Off To Form AustIRC

Recently a group of AustNet admins split of from the network to form a new network named AustIRC. IRC-Junkie finds out the reasons these admins decided to split of.

“You may of have recently heard that AustNet.org is shutting down, we can confirm that this is not true.  Unfortunately, various members of our admin team decided that they wanted to seperate from the network and fork off to start their own network”, AustNet admin Ryan announced on the AustNet website. “… we do not approve of was the way in which this was done, and their trickery through FUD to get users to move to their new network.  Therefore, the word on the street that you may of have heard that we were shutting down was simply false.”

IRC-Junkie got into contact with Chris, one of the admins that split of. “Everyone has their side of the story, but I submit that there was _nothing_ going on in terms of trickery.  They obviously have motivation to twist the truth — as the truth makes them look awful bad”, he explained to IRC-Junkie.

Chris explains the network’s development have been nihil over a period of three years, which showed in the decline of its users, from 10,000 simultaneous connections 4-5 years ago to about 3000 these days.

“The domain owner, ryan mills, absented himself for over 6 months without response.  The last time he signed on, however, he mentioned something about revamping the ircd.  So I began to develop an ircd based off of bahamut, ratbox, and a few others.  I imported austnet features.  All told, it probably took me well over 200 hours.  It was intended for the austnet network.  A vote was called to upgrade.  We also asked the services coder, who had been absent for over 3 years, to make some changes to support it.  That did not occur.”

As often happens in IRC networks, irritations grow, and votes are being held to remove admins and implement new services and code.

After the votes were being held and found positive, Chris got online the next day “to find that the servers I administered with another guy had had noopers placed on them (killing the opers when they /oper), and dns entries had been removed to our servers from the pool.  There was no vote authorizing the action.”

The admins affected then decided to move on and form a new network. “We kept the austnet.org name for 12 hours or so, thinking that maybe someone would straighten kevin out and we could potentially relink.  That did not happen, and there was a decision made to create a new network.” And thus, AustIRC was born.

IRC-Junkie did try to contact Ryan from AustNet for a reply, but have been unable too.

Thanks to Keith for the tip.

IRC: Too Complicated?

OK, this is going to be one of those rants I spit out from time to time. You know I love IRC, I use it to chat, help other users to chat and use it as a base for scientific groups because of its excellent ways to automate tasks with the help of bots. IRC evolves, new functionality is being added almost on a daily basis. And that should be a good thing. But I have to wonder, is IRC becoming too complicated for new users?

Lets take Undernet for example. Not to pick on it, because I love the place, but because this is the network I have most experience with. Just go along with me, and imagine being a new user who would like to check Undernet out because you heard you’ll find mind alikes there.

First you will need an IRC client. OK, maybe not such a big deal, in the end you will most likely bump into mIRC because it seems that is what everyone is using, too the extend some people speak of “see you on mIRC!”. Do you remember back then when you first installed a client? Would you think of hitting CTRL-O, click the Servers tab, and then select the correct network and then the server for your geographic location?

Once you found out how to get connected and get onto a channel, maybe only then you found out your host is visible for everyone else. OK, OK, we now have hosthiding. One way or the other you found out how to set +x automatically in your client. But then you autojoin your channel and find out you weren’t yet logged into X (registering an username is a story on itself as well) so the whole purpose was defeated. OK, Ok, there are scripts around now that wont rejoin a channel before you are logged in. But then, if someone wants to know your host they just have to put you on notify and /whois is when you connect. Ah well, you get the idea when it comes to this.

The power of mIRC scripting and the risks it brings to install and run scripts from people you don’t know warrant an entire story on itself. Yet, as any abuse member of any network knows, users have no problem to install whatever script they bump into.

Then there are the channelmodes. In the inconsistencies when it comes depending what network you’re on. Argh, you just wanted to chat!

Next you might want to start your own channel, because just maybe you didn’t really find the channel you wanted, or did not liked the feeling of the channel you found. Once you finally found 10 people there a very misty process will start of which I of course can’t comment much on, but without knowing the process getting the channel registered will proof to be quite hard.

These are just a few from the examples. I could list many more, for just my network of choice. Other networks will have at least an equal amount of examples waiting. And to add to it, channelmodes identifiers can have different meanings on different networks. Ask any IRC client coder! IRC services with the same name work differently on different networks. The list goes on and on.

As said, in these examples I picked out Undernet, only because I have most experience there. The story is exactly the same for other networks. The question remains the same: are we making IRC too complicated for new users of the medium? In the end its the users that make IRC, and its essential we attract new users to the medium. Keeping that in mind might help the admins and developers keep a fresh eye while developing new functionality to our platform of choice for chatting.