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Category Archives: Software

UnrealIRCd Survey

As the #1 most used IRC daemon on most networks, UnrealIRCd as we all know is a great daemon. It has many features, easy configureation and good irc support. But as IRC grows (or dies depending on how you look at it), there are more and more IRC daemons being released. With all of the long time IRC users learning to code, they decide to branch out either from the unrealircd source or from another IRC daemon source. With that being said, UnrealIRCd is slowly moving down the popularity list.

So to improve the UnrealIRCd, Syzop (Bram Matthys), has decided to launch an online survey.

This survey is not only for those who have dealt with UnrealIRCd as a developer, but for anyone and everyone who has ever been on an IRC network, that runs UnrealIRCd, either as just a user, an admin, or a developer. The results from the survey will be used by the UnrealIRCd development team to know what areas to focus more time on in the Unreal3.4.x series

The purpose of this survey is to give us a good idea of how people think about UnrealIRCd, how it’s being used, and – even more important – in what areas we should improve.
–Syzop, Project Leader. Developer/maintainer of UnrealIRCd 3.2.x and 3.4.x

So if you like, dislike, or want UnrealIRCd to be improved in any way, shape or form, this is your time to fill out this survey. It takes about 15 minutes of your time to complete (only if you end up having to answer all 33 questions), But some questions are skipped depending on your answer for some questions.

If you have 15 minutes to spare right now, we encourage you to visit http://survey.unrealircd.com

IceChat

IceChat is an open source IRC Client developed by Snerf in July of 2000, first named sIRC. This version still exists and works with very minimum features.

Screenshot:

sIRC Screenshot

It was then recoded from scratch and renamed to VClient in August of 2001 to Icechat.

Screenshot:

VClient Screenshot

To this date, Icechat has now managed to have its on in-built VBS script engine as well as many everyday IRC features. The best feature, It’s FREE! Ice chat is compatible with Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista and also Windows 7, it has also been tested on 64bit XP, Vista and Windows 7.

IceChat also has some very unique features that make it a special IRC Client. A few features to be noted include but not limited to built in emoticons, which can de disabled if the user wishes, a Favorite Server Tree, IRCv3 capabilities and built in virus scanners.

Since the beginning of IceChat, it has now gone through multiple rewrites and is now cross-platform friendly. It now has mirc scripting abilities, VB Scripting and multi-language support. IceChat has now had over 30,000 downloads with a few Beta testers to make sure the release version doesnt have any major bugs.

IceChat is now in version 9, which started in January of 2009 in C# and was yet again a rewrite. The latest release of v9 was released February 9th, 2013.

Icechat currently has its own support channel on the Freenode IRC network at #IceChat

Efnet faces major attack on New Year’s Eve [Update 2]

IRC servers with code based on old Ratbox 2.0 code are vulnerable to a bug in the code that handles user authentication. It was found and published at 7 pm GMT by IRC member Fudge when he messed around with the protocol TS6. Charybdis developer nenolod was informed about the issue in the development channel #charybdis. Shortly after that him and other members agreed on that the bug was “pretty serious”.

A working example of how an IRC server could be brought down via this bug was published in the channel. Some person, or a group people, began to misuse the information they presumably got from the channel in order to bring down Efnet. At 10:45 pm GMT, many servers have been patched and restarted, but there are still ten servers, including services.int [Update: services.int is down due to unrelated maintenance according to EFnet], missing, according to the automatically updated network map on http://map.efnet.net/. To bring a server down, the attacker does not need any special privileges. All they would need to do is to send one line consisting of less than 15 characters.

A new version of Charybdis was released around 22.00 pm later this same evening. Patch files for both Ratbox and Charybdis have been sent to many IRC administrators, so that they can secure their servers against this exploit as soon as possible.

Some of the affected channels include #irchelp, a channel that now has a new date of creation:
-!- Channel #irchelp created Mon Dec 31 22:32:01 2012

It is likely that the operators of #chanfix will get a dramatically increased work load during the next couple of hours. They have prepared well by setting the topic of the channel:
Yes we know EFnet just took a mickey. Plz state the channel with the problem and wait…

There are rumours around claiming Hybrid is also affected, but they have not been confirmed [Update 2: According to the IRCd-Hybrid team, it is not affected by the vulnerability]. As the number of IRC servers forked from Ratbox, with exploitable code, is relatively high it is highly likely that servers on many networks will go up and down for the next few days.

Freenode was one of the first networks to patch themselves, occuring only minutes after the seriousness of the issue had been established. Thanks to staff member tomaw all relevant servers could be secured before any harm was done.

IRC servers which have been confirmed by their developers as patched against this vulnerability are:

  • ShadowIRCd 6.3.3
  • Charybdis 3.4.2
  • Ratbox 3.0.8

Article to be updated when more information is available…

 

Link to the original advisory: http://www.ratbox.org/ASA-2012-12-31.txt

KiwiIRC

KiwiIRC is a web-based, open source IRC Client that was started around two years ago by Darren Whitlen, known as prawnsalad on IRC, as a “Can I do this” type of project. It was abandoned for a few months due to lack of time. After those few months passed Darren had some other developers who grew an interest into the project and jumped in helping release it once again.

The goal of the KiwiIRC client is to allow users without IRC knowledge to be able to communicate with each other on a simple to use web-based irc client. Aside from the client being web-based, it can also be embedded onto your chatsite and used for your personal IRC network. For for information on this please see http://kiwiirc.com/embedding.

Besides the above facts, it now has a Google Chrome extension, as well as a Firefox application, and it is compatible with your Android/Apple phones and tablets.

KiwiIRC has plans for the near future to have a fully functional admin web-panel to help the admin/staff of an IRC network to maintain and control the users as well as change KiwiIRC configuration options, without having to manually edit the files.

Screenshots:

KiwiIRC

The open source project can be found at http://github.com/prawnsalad/kiwiirc.
For more information regarding KiwiIRC, please visit http://www.kiwiirc.com

InspIRCd Updates & New Website

After quite a prolonged downtime, the InspIRCd website and Wiki is back up again, although not under its original domain any more but is now hosted on GitHub.

There have been new releases in all current branches as well as a new Beta release in the 2.1 branch.

Users of the 1.2 versions are strongly advised to upgrade their IRCds at least to version 1.2.9rc1 due to the recently found vulnerability and, if possible, they should update to InspIRCd 2.0.x as the 1.2 branch is nearing its end-of-life if no new maintainer is found.

People interested in maintaining the InspIRCd 1.2 branch should get in touch with the developers via their IRC channel on Chatspike.