Apparently I had forgot to include an urlencode somewhere which did not surface until now.
The feed should be OK now. Excuses for the inconvenience.
Monthly Archives: May 2008
EFnet Enables SSL Connections
“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.”
According to Taliz, around 200 clients are using the feature right now, but its growing as the word is spreading around.
Finally, Taliz ends with a small warning. “Until ratbox 3 goes “stable”, you may expect more frequent restarts due to bugs being worked out.”
New Zealand Botnet Master Arrested
An 18-year-old New Zealand suspect has been arrested in a botnet case. He is suspected of controlling a botnet consisting over 1 million infected computers and having caused nearly 13.5 Euro million in damages.
The botnet consists of AKBot worm infected machines. The botnet has been used to attack IRC networks, security companies and the University of Philadelphia.
“He is extremely clever”, said Maarten Kleintjes, head of the computer criminality department.
He is also acused of leading a worldwide network called the A-Team with members from New Zealand, Holland and the USA. New Zealand police worked togheter with the FBI on this arrest, codenamed “AKILL”.
Thirteen more arrest warrants have been issued.
mIRC 6.32 Released
Version 6.32 of probably the most popular IRC client have been released yesterday.
“This version of mIRC builds on recent releases by focusing on stability and reliability and addressing the various issues that have been reported by users since the last release. It includes cosmetic changes to the interface, fixes, optimizations, and improvements to the scripting language,” the mIRC website reports.
Some of the major changes include longer nicknames, channel names and messages as well as longer variables in scripting. Other changes include:
* Added support for network-specific window position saving.
* Fixed mouse wheel handling of scrolling with high resolution mice.
* A “Check for Updates” option has been added to the mIRC Help menu to automatically check for new versions of mIRC.
* Optimized INI file handling to only update those parts of a file that have changed. This decreases file writes and speeds up a number of features in mIRC, including USB drive usage.
* Improved display speed of text in all windows.
* Fixed multi-byte text-wrapping display issues.
* Fixed and optimized a number of @window display features, including the way tabstops are handled.
* Improved unicode support in the $mp3() identifier.
“In total there have been over 50 changes to this version and although most of them are only small fixes and tweaks, we hope that they result in a more useful and stable mIRC for you.”
Denora 1.4.0 Released
“Yes. Oh, yes… It’s there,” the Denora website announced. “Over two years and 9 months after the last stable release, we now finally set the next major version in the wild: Denora 1.4.0! There have been hundreds of changes, improvements and fixes. We believe Denora 1.4 will bring you a more reliable and satisfying experience.”
Denora is an IRC server and network statistics package. Derived from Thales and Anope it is linked to the network as an IRC services server. Denora developer Hal9000 explains: “Basically Denora connects to its uplink ircd and fetches information about servers, channels and users. This information is partially stored in flat files and can be used to generate an HTML file, or requested via an XMLRPC interface. But the most interesting part perhaps is Denora’s ability to connect to an SQL server. Besides the basic stuff that is also stored in flatfiles, in SQL mode Denora can assign a Bot to a channel and let it monitor how much users talk and so on. This information can be used in a number of ways, the most common being via phpDenora, which is a parallel project that provides a web frontend to Denora. Also, Denora allows the addition of modules. Because of the code similarity to Anope, people familiar with coding for Anope should find at ease writing modules for Denora as well.”
It took almost 3 years to release this new stable version. IRC-Junkie asked Hal9000 why it took this long. “First I believe we were a bit too careful about releasing Denora 1.2 back in 2006, as it already was superior to version 1.1. Then we had a server hard drive crash, which ruined our SVN repository. So we had to basically go on from what we had, not really knowing what had been changed when and how. Last but not least, the founder Trystan decided to leave the project, and other devels/testers became less active.”
Hal9000 plans to release minor 1.4.x versions over time so users will not have to wait this long anymore.
Denora 1.4 is now considered stable on Unreal 3.2 and InspIRCd 1.1 networks, Nefarious, ircu and other p10-based ircds are considered to work “pretty well” with this new release.
There is no release yet for Windows. Hal9000 explains: “We got an issue with *printf functions, making Denora crash when trying to compose some longer SQL queries. We still have little clue about how to fix this, but I hope that we’ll get some help from experienced windows C coders 
”