www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

About half a decade ago Open and Free Technology Community (OFTC) separated from OpenProjects.net, founded by Rob ‘lilo” Levin, because of different opinions on fund raising and managing the project.

One year ago Rob Levin was hit by a car and died by the injuries. Freenode has since then made changes within its managing structure where users can have more influences in decision making and a more transparent organization in general.

This new cooperation between the two networks initially will be observing each others operations and swapping of of staff. What the future cooperation will be like, including a possible merger is not yet laid out. But both sides are interested in taking next steps.

A possible DoS has been found in IRCd-Ratbox. This IRCd is in use on EFNet and other smaller networks.

The discovery was announced on the Ratbox mailinglist by Lee H: “We have recently uncovered a potential DoS in ircd-ratbox that could result in resource starvation of the CPU.”

The bug dates back to very early version of Ratbox, which makes it a vulnerability that is presence in all flavors of the IRCd in use.

“We have now released ircd-ratbox-2.2.6, it is recommended that everybody upgrades — the attack is fairly easy to abuse.  Details follow in the next email”, Lee ends. Since then, Lee retracted to give more details about the exploit to prevent malicious users causing havoc.

The 31st of May the Oslo* server duo from Undernet will be delinked. They served the Undernet community for many years, and its staff was active in different help related channels, with #nastrand being well known.

IRC-Junkie had a short interview with one of the admins of the server duo, Bjoern. Bjoern Vik, living in Oslo Norway, has been working in the IP business for about a decade and became involved with Undernet in 2002.

Undernet introduced multiple logins a few years ago to be forthcoming to users who had to login from work while their home connection was still running for example. In this article however the decision had to be made to remove the functionality again as users were abusing the feature by having bots flood channel that had the +r flag set. The flag requires users to be logged in to join a channel.

Undernet user, and #help op Eenie did not settle with the decision however and started a petition and website in September 2006. “Five hundred and seventy (570) users signed it”, Eenie said to IRC-Junkie.

No, no, IRC-Junkie won’t go into politics. This is about a game, trust me! The users of IRC that go back a few years might remember the game Tanks for mIRC. Development was halted for quite some time, but recently the game has gotten a new share of fans.

“It has become a success on Beirut network in early 2006 when I have included the game in my script which is used by the majority of the users. And since 2005 we reached around 18.000 downloads which has boosted the tanks players,” said Stefano, network founder, in a reaction to IRC-Junkie.