Archive for the ‘IRC’ Category

EFnet Admin Jafo Passes Away

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

EFnet.org reports the passing of Brad Allan Killebrew (also known as Jafo), admin on EFnet of the servers ircd.lagged.org and irc.nac.net.

“Mr. Killebrew was born in Temple to William Lee and Dianne Killebrew. He was a systems engineer for the Texas Network. He lived in Temple until the age of 10 and moved to Humble with his family where he graduated from Humble High School. He received a bachelors degree from the University of Houston. He was a member if the Institute for Electronic Engineer Computer Society, North American Network Operations Group and the American Radio Relay League. He was also an amateur radio operator”, the EFnet site reports.

Happy BDay :-) !

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

It has been 25 years ago that professor Scott E. Fahlman, working at the Carnegie Mellon University, for the first time used the :-) emoticon (or smiley, depending on your religion on this) in an email.

He used the emoticon on a bulletin board in a discussion on the topic of online humor and the limits of it to express comments meant to be taken lightly. “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) ,” he wrote. “Read it sideways.”

Variations on the original emoticon started to pop up pretty quickly, like the ;-) wink variation. The IRC ABC article on this page contains more exotic emoticon such as <:-) (Santa Claus) and  12x@>—>— (A dozen roses).

IRC Defender Back Under Development

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

“After a long period of downtime, Defender is back under active development. There’s a lot of mess as far as the website goes (under construction yadda yadda) but at least there’s someone to get a hold of if things go wrong”, the IRC Defender website announced. This modular Perl based piece of software is coded to help networks with security issues such as worms, spambots and viruses.

IRC & Moderation: A Well Made Match?

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

Moderating IRC regularly makes the news, especially in junction with online child safety, or IRC network with a family type of character. But how does this work in reality? Is IRC completely moderatable? What are the costs of a moderated network? And what if moderation failed? Time for IRC-Junkie to contact several people in-the-know and see if theres an easy answer.

Let us first see what actually can be moderated on an IRC network:

1) Channel names – Check channel names that seem to point to unwanted content.

2) Channel traffic – Having network personnel actively monitoring channel traffic.

Drones, a Continuous Problem for Small Networks

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

In February 2006 IRC-Junkie featured an article titled “Help! My Network is in Servers.ini!”. In short, the article names one of the problems small networks engage when they become listed in mIRC’s servers.ini.

One of the major drawbacks is that not only humans use this file, downloading an up-to-date servers.ini is also one of the first things a newly installed drone is doing. And thus, attracting drones is one of the side effects that could cause a lot of problems that eat up valuable resources, which are often not really in abundance on small networks anyway.