[Asmo]

Digital age contributing to the decline of the English language?

Sunday, January 25 2004 by Asmo

This article is another plea for the English language, which would be under pressure in this digital age.

"Some examples are "LOL" for "laugh out "loud", "b4" for "before" and "gr8" for "great".
The debate that the use of these abbreviations is contributing to the decline of the English language sounds familiar. It reminds me of the time when academics debated the appropriateness of slang usage in everyday life."

The article also says how this "declination" can be stopped. Teachers could print out SMS or IRC chat logs, and have students type out the text in proper English.

IRCJunkie wonders, have languages never been adapting to the customs, habits and ways of time?

Romanian viruswriter faces up to 15 years in prison

Wednesday, January 21 2004 by Asmo

Bitdefender reports about Dan Dumitru Ciobanu, a 26-year-old author of a MSBlast variant. He will have to face trial in Iasa country for making a variant of the virus, and releasing it on a university, where it eventually only infected about 27 computers.

If found guilty, he will face 3 to 15 years in prison.

New mIRC servers.ini

Tuesday, January 20 2004 by Asmo

A new servers.ini is released on mIRC's website.

After you downloaded it and placed it in your mIRC's directory, the news servers are available immediately.

QuakeNet conducts client survey

Monday, January 19 2004 by Asmo

Last week QuakeNet did a network-wide CTCP VERSION in a survey looking at what clients their users are running. Not surprisingly, at 93.71% mIRC is leading the charts, followed with Irssi at second place with a mere 2.27%. The multi chat protocol program Trillian comes third at 1.58%.

A total of 171435 CTCP responses were received. Approximately 50,000 clients did not respond to the CTCP request.

The full list can be found on the website of QuakeNet.

QuakeNet suspends commercial trust requests

Saturday, January 17 2004 by Asmo

From today onwards QuakeNet will suspend all requests for commercial trusted hosts.

A "trusted host" is allowed to have more then 5 concurrent connections to QuakeNet at the same time. It is especially a wanted feature by commercial shell companies who can have multiple of their customers connect to the network from the same host.

"The reason for this is the high amount of abuse we have received from trusted hosts recently", the website of QuakeNet explains. In a reaction to IRCJunkie, the writer of the article Ferg explained among the abuse were advertising- and spambots and flood clones.

"Many of these services also allowed their clients to change ident at will, effectively making them immune from glines unless we glined the organizations entire trust" Ferg explained us. If glines can not resolve the issue, there is not much left what a network can do.

On a related note, the Undernet network had to remove the possibility for users to have multiple connections using the host hiding mode +x after some users abused this functionality to have a collection of flood bots using this to flood channels with the "must be registered to join" channel mode +r set.

Happy personal firewall day!

Friday, January 16 2004 by Asmo

Running a firewall should be as normal as locking your house, but unfortunately many people that are connected to the Internet think they can do without, and often end up infected without even realizing it.

These days viruses, worms and other nastiness do a good job at concealing them self. The coders of them try their best to keep the viruses hidden, because they gain profit from each and every infected machine under their control.

On IRC there are many channels where the infected machines connect to, and report to their "masters" any typed passwords, credit card information used on websites, etc.

A firewall could have prevented getting infected in the first place, as known exploits in your operating system is closed off from access from the Internet. And even if you get infected then, it can prevent the virus from connecting and reporting to the virus-coder and pass on any information or participate in DDoS attacks.

On the website of the campaign you can find a bit more information about Personal Firewall Day, how you can protect yourself, and how you can help your friends and family if you are more known in this area.
Remember that a firewall doesn't have to cost anything. Windows XP comes with a build in firewall which you just have to flip on, and there are also freeware firewalls available from the Internet, check the links page to get started.

Visual IRC 2.0 released

Thursday, January 15 2004 by Asmo

Version 2 of this IRC client for Windows platforms has been released.

"Event mask wizard for easier scripting. The tab bar is now a plugin, and a mouse gesture plugin is also included. Several scripting changes/fixes for COM and OLE Automation. Several other bug fixes, including a DCC compatibility fix for newer versions of mIRC" the website tells us. A full changelog can be found here.

DALnet adds Spanish translations to the documentation

Thursday, January 15 2004 by Asmo

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the DALnet documentation Project now announces the Spanish section as completed," ssr of the DALnet documentation Project announced.

The DALnet documentation Project currently has documentation in Spanish, Greek, German, English and Turkish. The committee is currently searching for people who can help translate the documentation in Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew and Russian. If you think you can help them out, they can be found in #DocsTeam.

Update: On the 21st of Januari 2004 the Documentation Project also added Malay to the list of available languages.

M_Spy, breach of privacy or useful tool?

Thursday, January 8 2004 by Asmo

Recently a module came to the attention of IRCJunkie which could be considered at least controversial, and could breach the privacy of users network wide if used without taking care of the privacy of users.

The module in question is m_spy, a module for UnrealIRCd beta19. The author describes the module as follow: "m_spy allows you to see users' private and channel messages (both PRIVMSGs and NOTICEs) sent from anywhere on the IRC network in real time."

It is obvious that this module is a easy tool to abuse on networks where privacy matters are not clearly defined and admins have less restricted protocols to follow when it comes to privacy issues.

"I know it's very unethical to steal information without the knowledge of users", m_spy author AngryWolf stated in a reaction to IRCJunkie. "I just would like to make it honorable and take advantage of righteous monitoring of mischievous people who send spams or do any other unwanted things." If used wisely, this module could indeed be a great aid for Abuse committee's on IRC networks who can monitor known abuse and drone channels.

IRCJunkie asked AngryWolf in what way privacy concerns affected his project. "My first attempt was to add some notices in the documentation about privacy issues, which didn't result in what I expected: a lot of people still did not take them seriously. Therefore the second time I added a version flag that shows in /version that m_spy is being used. Neither this helped, nor that I restricted the commands provided by the module to Services Admins and added a snomask to let all IRC operators be notified when the commands are used." Currently the module is restricted to Unreal3.2-beta19 and up, as this version allows all users to use /module, and thus see what modules are being loaded.

We asked if he knew any networks who are using the module currently. "All I know it's used on small networks. I feel it impossible to be used on big ones" AngryWolf answered. "Obviously, server admins don't like to let everyone know what they are doing behind their users' back."

If such a module is in use on a network, letting the users know in the /MOTD seems to be a good way to make them aware their chat might be monitored. "I don't force server admins to change their MOTD or anything else, but I strongly suggest them to do that", Angry Wolf reacts. "Some days before beta19 came out, I gave up being worried about abuse. You know, I can't forbid them to abuse, however if they use my module in an unethical manner, it won't be my fault."

Update: A discussion on this article has been started at SearchIRC.com.

WinBot 2.7 Released

Wednesday, January 7 2004 by Asmo

"WinBot 2.7 has finally been released with some vital fixes and some new features that were unfortunately held back longer than expected", WinBot coder Brain wrote IRCJunkie in a press release.

Version 2.7 mainly consists of bug fixes, with a few new features. A new $strip() function to remove text formatting from a string, and a new button that enables or disables emoticons in the program are two of the new features.

WinBot is a freeware program that runs on the Windows operating systems. It is a full featured bot you can use to manage channels and comes with support for Perl scripting.

Snak version 4.9.8 released

Friday, January 2 2004 by Asmo

Snak is a client for Macintosh OS's and version 4.9.8 is released today.

This version only contains fixes for bugs, all listed on the change log.

Snak is shareware and costs $20 USD after a 30 day evaluation period.

XChat 2.0.7 released

Friday, January 2 2004 by Asmo

Version 2.0.7 of this popular client for *nix (X Windows) and Windows is released.

This version fixes the remote crash that would occur when receiving a passive DCC request with an invalid number. This was not exploitable, but did result in a crash.

Other (minor) changes can be seen on the changelog.

Binaries can be downloaded for Linux and Windows.
_________________
Asmo

webmaster www.IRC-Junkie.org