www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

In May 2004 IRC-Junkie reported about the ongoing problems for the IRCHighway network caused by DDoS. In June of this year Jason Michael Downey, known as Nessun and owner of the network Rizon, was arrested for these problems.

This PDF outlines the sentence Nessun heard on the 23rd of this month. We can read: “Jason Michael Downey, the operator of “bot network” of virus infected computers that he used to attack other computer systems, was sentenced to a year in federal prison today on his conviction for unlawful computer intrusion that caused over $20,000 in damages to other computer networks, United States Attorney Stephen J. Murphy announced today.”

In October 1992 Danny “WildThang” Mitchell, Donald “WHIZZARD” Lambert, and Laurent “_dl” modified the EFnet irc2.7 IRC deamon and started an experimental network that became known as the Undernet IRC network. This month it will celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Today Undernet still is one of the largest IRC networks where on average 120k users are online.

More information on Undernet’s history can be found on this User-Com page.

Undernet’s User-Com is planning an event of which details are not yet known.

There is also a group of users who are independently from Undernet organizing an event which will take place the 25th of November in #undernet15.

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.

“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.

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.