www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

On networks that don’t hide your IP or hostname automatically on connect, your IP is exposed for everyone to see and possibly abuse.

Also there are many reasons you might not want to show everyone from what point of the world you are connecting from and/or want to add a little more anonymonity to your online activities.

You can do so by connecting to IRC via TOR – dubbed “The Onion Router” – how exactly that works and is set up is shown in a small tutorial video we’ve put online.

lightIRC, the “fast, free, flash-based IRC client written in ActionScript 3″ just released version 0.9.6 of their embeddable webchat.

Quoting their webpage, “lightIRC supports channels, queries, a lot of IRC commands, some CTCP commands and is much customizable through StyleSheets” and also has “multi language support” as well as a “nice GUI to set kicks, bans and channel modes”.

lightIRC Webinterface

Since this version, lightIRC got a webcam feature which uses the Red5 streaming server as its backend, though thats currently only available on their IRCd – but you can contact the author if “you are interested in purchasing the webcam extension for your IRC network”.

So you want to have a bouncer to stay connected on your favourite IRC network, hide your IP from hackers and the likes and all that without paying a single cent? Look no further, below we have gathered a few providers of such free BNCs and put them to a test – of course without them knowing

Note that we’ve only tested providers that require no sign-up for dubious services and provide bouncers which are free to use on any network and not only on the one where they have their support-channel – some however ask you to idle there and might cancel your BNC if they find you to not comply with this.

Mibbit, the popular webchat client for IRC, once again made a few updates to their service.

In the announcement they write that, due their tremendous growth, have “expanded from having a single backend for Widgets, to having 4 backend servers” which “also gives us failover, and an easy way to update backends without having to kick everyone off”.

Since all backends use the same IP, IRC networks that use Mibbit for their webchat don’t have to change anything.

The new features that were introduced with this update is WebSocket support, a feature currently only available in Google Chrome:

A bouncer (BNC for short) is a piece of software used to relay the communication between an IRC client and the network it is connected to, acting as a Proxy.

So, whats the point you ask? The reasons and benefits of using a bouncer are many and include hiding the real IP you are connecting from, protecting your nickname and channel from being taken on networks that don’t provide channel-/nickname registration and most of the time they’ll also notify you of private messages that came in when you’ve been disconnected – of course only when the bouncer can stay online being connected from a server.