lightIRC 0.9.9 released

The free Flash IRC client lightIRC has been released on April 1st and that totally wasn’t an April Fools joke.

lightIRC 0.9.9 Channel View

The webchat client adds new translations for Greek, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and Bulgarian and is now available in a whopping total of 20 languages.

The need to access an authentication-file on lightirc.com has been removed and therefore it can now run on a LAN without any kind of Internet-access.

lightIRC 0.9.9 Channel Central

There have been a few miscellaneous fixes and a little code cleanup according to author valentin and the changelog also mentions a feature removal – The proxy feature has been dropped since it wasn’t “running good enough for production environments”.

The download of version 0.9.9 as well as the complete changelog can be found here.

April Fools! :P

Ok, ok, i’ll admit it – we won’t switch to 1337, .-- . / .-- .. .-.. .-.. / ... .-- .. - -.-. .... / - --- / -- --- .-. ... . / .. -. ... - . .- -.. .-.-.-

Just kidding *cough* – just as y’all have guessed it was an April Fools joke.. But hey, we weren’t the only ones to pull a little prank on that occasion.

The InspIRCd project announced the “latest greatest innovation in IRC technology” which is the “best thing since sliced bread,the InspIRCd-only /SACONNECT command”. But uhhh – what exactly is and does that?

Brain writes:

The /SACONNECT command is available for download now, and will connect a user to your IRC network on request. Simply by providing their IP address it will force the target address to start up their client and connect to your network whether or not they actually want to do so. If a client does not exist, the program will deploy an installer which will make sure the system is then IRC-capable, and connect them. Support is provided for Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X. Of course, the module will be regularly updated using rules from the ‘nessus‘ scanner to ensure it is always able to do what it is designed for, which is bending the insignificant to your will as an IRC netadmin.

But that’s not all: “In the event the PC is not responding, a wake-on-lan signal will be sent to wake up the PC before initiating the groundbreaking technologies shown above.”

I for one welcome my new IRCd overlords

QuakeNet also played an elaborate hoax on its users – Starting midnight QuakeNets bot Q started spamming channels and users that they had earned achievements of one sort or another.

Sample:

<@Q> [shroud] has earned the achievement [Q Obsessed]!
<@Q> [shroud] has earned the achievement [Stalker]!

Q also had gained a few new commands, for example to list and compare the achievements of 2 users. If you were lucky you could unlock titles and choose one of them to use.

QuakeNet staffer meeb stood true to the promise that there would be “some light hearted fun in the near future” he gave when we interviewed him and introduced the so-called Bossbot which he described as follows: “Bossbot simulates a WoW raid (if you have no idea what I’m going on about here you can probably skip this paragraph). You can team up with other users and take on the evil bossbot in #blackrockmountain.”

The achievements and Bossbot-battles however – as we would find out a day later – weren’t just an April Fools joke but are here to stay.

They’re now available on an opt-in basis rather than globally enabled which should please those that have been annoyed with the large amount of spam generated by the achievements.

Did you witness any other IRC-related April Fools? Post them in the comments!

IRC-Junkie goes 1337

Starting today, IRC-Junkie will post their news in 1337speak.

F0ll0w1ng 7h3 n3x7 f3w d4y5 w3 w1ll c0nv3|27 4ll 0f 0u|2 4|2ch1v3d n3w5 570|2135 70 1337 4nd 7h3 cu|2|23n7ly 4v41l4bl3 4|271cl35 w1ll b3 |23pl4c3d w17h 7h31|2 13373|2 c0un73|2p4|275.

Pl3453 b34|2 w17h u5 wh1l3 w3 m4k3 7h15 1mp0|274n7 7|24n51710n 4nd 1f y0u w4n7 70 h3lp u5 w17h c0nv3|271ng 7h3 4|271cl35 70 7h3 n3w f0|2m47, pl3453 |234d 7h15 d0cum3n7 0n h0w y0u c0uld h3lp u5 d01ng 50.

Atheme / InspIRCd m_invisible brouhaha

Those who closely follow either projects development will have noticed a few “odd” looking commits to their sourcecode in the past few days.

The commits all concerned InspIRCds m_invisible module which provides similar functionality as the old mode +I in UnrealIRCd 3.1.x.

Quoting the InspIRCd wiki page about m_invisible the module

adds support for quiet (invisible) opers. A quiet oper is invisible to normal users on channels. This can be used for surveillence of botnet channels, statistics bots, etc. Note that other opers CAN see invisible opers; +Q only hides the oper from non-opers.

The brawl emerged when Atheme developer nenolod commited a few changes to the services packages that would make such a join visible to channel members by announcing that “Channel security has been compromised” because an invisible user has joined.

This commit was followed up by danieldg of the InspIRCd developer team who moved the module out of the main – and therefore by default included – modules into the seperate “inspircd-extras” repository, but only in the 2.0 beta and 2.1 pre-alpha branches.

The initial commits to Atheme have since been reverted but there now are checks for m_invisible being loaded and the services package now refuses to link if it spots the module being present.

The module, referred to as “morally unacceptable” and “not … ethical” by nenolod, has legitimate uses such as “private networks inside offices, with special uses, those do need logging and accountability, most of them even disable private messages entirely” said developer Brain when asked about his views of this whole situation. They wrote it because “users asked for the module” and his opinion is that it “should be kept, and we’re keeping it, in third party”.

Brain says to him “it’s all about choice, the choice to run the modules or not to, we aren’t going to tell people whats right and wrong” and that “people are sensible enough and educated enough to decide for themselves”.

What’s your opinion about this? Do you use m_invisible on your network? And if so, do you tell your users that such a module is loaded? Guns don’t kill, people do?

Yaaic Android IRC client 0.2 released

The Yaaic project brings us yet another release of their IRC client for the Android platform and is now available for download as version 0.2.

This new version – released just one week after v0.1 – has a few bugs fixed, features added as well as a few cosmetic touch-ups.

Developer pocmo writes in his announcement that he, despite the fact that he dropped the “Beta” from its name, still considers Yaaic to be in the Beta stage which it will most likely remain “as long as there’s a 0 at the beginning of the version number”.

57 commits have been made and a few nasty bugs have been squashed – One particularly nasty bug “causing some messages to appear in the wrong channels / queries” has been fixed which makes this new release a recommended upgrade.

UTF-8 is now the default encoding and according to pocmo there will be an option to choose one in a future release.

The download for version 0.2 can be found here and the complete changelog is located here.

www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

All about Internet Relay Chat

lightIRC 0.9.9 released

April Fools! :P

IRC-Junkie goes 1337

Atheme / InspIRCd m_invisible brouhaha

Yaaic Android IRC client 0.2 released