[Asmo]

New Xchat development version available

Friday, November 29 2002 by cArLiLLoS

A new development version (1.9 series) of the nice Linux graphical IRC client, XChat, is now available at its website for the pleasure of its customers

Source tarball of 1.9.6. development version can be downloaded from here. Some of the latest features and changes present in this version include: spanish and estonian translations; fixed bugs on the background color and topic entry bar; etc. The updated changelog can also be seen here. Enjoy !

Popular script Peace and Protection stops development

Wednesday, November 27 2002 by cArLiLLoS

Peace and Protection, the quite known and used mIRC script coded by pai, has ceased its development and its webpage closed definitely as stated in mirc.net. The articles and other contents (mIRC scripting lessons) that existed in PnP's website might be moved on to the mirc.net site now.

It's really sad news for the IRC people (including myself) who use PnP and who will no longer see another version of this awesome script.

IRC perfect place for p2p refugees? And then?

Wednesday, November 27 2002 by Asmo

In a hearing on monday in a Los Angeles court the Recording Industry Association of America brought up arguments against the peer to peer network Kazaa. The hearing is meant for the court to decide wether copyright infringment has sufficiently being broken for a lawsuit to proceed.

Student Michael Jurka of the UC Berkeley university said to the Daily Californian: "If Kazaa dies, I'll switch to Gnutella or other file-sharing networks, or learn how to use (Internet Relay Chat) and use that"

One might wonder, once all the popular peer to peer networks have been wiped out by RIAA's continious lawsuits, and users are going to use the popular IRC networks to continue downloading mp3 files, will the IRC networks be the next target of the RIAA in court? And if that happens, how will these non-profit organisations be able to defend themself against a organisation like the RIAA? Maybe it is time to start thinking ahead...

Undernet prepares 10th year celebration mega-event

Tuesday, November 26 2002 by Asmo

Using the Undernet forum cArLiLLoS, #Userguide member and co-reporter for this website, announced the preparations of a mega event next year january celebrating the 10th year aniversary of this network.

The event will include sessions with the Undernet founders and founders and current admins of several commitees. Stay tuned for the exact time and date, as well as a program.

QuakeNet closes down "Lotteries/Raffles/Giveaways/Tombolas" channels

Monday, November 25 2002 by Asmo

Yesterday the QuakeNet administration decided to close down several channels on the network due to activities that where starting to become a nuisance to other users on the network. These channels are only accesible now by QuakeNet operators.

A few channels started to organise lotteries of BNC shells, and users where encouraged to spam the channel and the lottery in other channels. In a reaction to questions from IRCJunkie Faile, operator on QuakeNet answered:

"I dont need to tell you that this kind of behavior isnt appreciated among the staff nor our users. The only reason people throw lotteries and giveaways like this is to get as many people as possible in their channel. They are encouraged to spam as much as they can. So rather than dealing with all these people on a individual basis we strike at the core of the problem."

We have seen similar actions (the closing of channels) leading to DDoS attacks as a retaliation, and as such we asked Fail if he is not afraid QuakeNet administration is triggering a similar reaction with the closure of these channels:

"We are aware that by doing this we might piss a few people off enough to warrant an attack. But that'd be like giving in to the spammers, spam is and always will be forbidden. Please read a few of the comments in relation to our newspost and you will see that the majority of them are very positive about this."

On a small sidenote: the user ticker showed QuakeNet to reach 149110 concurrent users yesterday. Soooo close to that magical 150k clients!

IRCNet server returns

Sunday, November 24 2002 by Asmo

The server that has been destroyed in the big fire at the University of Twente in the Netherlands on 20th november irc.snt.utwente.nl, returned to IRCNet. Good news for the Dutch part of IRCNet. Let's hope all the other services that where hosted on there will return soon too.

DalNet's IRCD-QA team is looking for new members

Sunday, November 24 2002 by Asmo

The DalNet team which is responsible for tracking down bugs in the ircd they are using, as well as writing documentation for it is looking for new members. The team is named IRCD-QA, which stands for ircd-quality ensurance.

"Whether you're an expert of the ircd, and know every aspect of it down to the very complex core underlying; or you're just an average user, who wants to get more involved with bahamut or DALnet. In all cases we would like for you to join us in making the better ircd." Says srd, coordinator from the team.

Those who are interested in becomming part of this team are invited to send a email to srd.

New version of eggdrop has been released

Saturday, November 23 2002 by Goodie

Yesterday, 22 November 2002 a new version of eggdrop has been released: eggdrop 1.6.13 .

The new version includes some changes and bug fixes such as:
- eggdrop simple, advanced and complete.conf have been replaced with a single file named eggdrop.conf
- ban-time, invite-time and exempt-time can be set through the .chanset command instead of the global settings in the config file.
- some of the bugs from early version 1.1.5 have been fixed
- eggdrop should be able to compile on older versions of SunOS
- the user lookup functions are much faster now
*NOTE: Versions of UnrealIRCd earlier than 3.2 beta 11 doesn't show halfop status in who info. This is not an eggdrop bug, it is an IRCd problem.
Here you can find a list of detalied updates .
You can get the latest version of eggdrop from here .

Eggdrop is the most advanced, most popular, and best supported IRC bot and is designed to provide channel management and protection for the IRC users.

Webchat for Undernet, EFNet and IRCNet

Saturday, November 23 2002 by Asmo

For those working in firewalled companies, and unable to chat on IRC due to that firewall, we have a new way to be able to chat anyway.

Rostelecom, owner of IRC servers on these three networks have setup a page where you can chat on either three of their server. All going over port 80.

weekly virus report, week 47

Friday, November 22 2002 by snatcher

Week 47 isn't too scary on the irc related viruses-front. We have only found one mentionable virus this week ;o)

Backdoor.Irc.Contact (discovered on Nov 1 is a backdoor Trojan that gives an attacker access to the infected computer (Unauthorized access). The trojan opens by default port 6667 when runned. Also, it joins a specific IRC channel and then waits for commands from the attacker. The attacker can get system and network information, files can be downloaded and executed, DoS attacks can be remotely performed, and the infectees computer can easily be restarted. The systems that could get infected are all Windows versions except 3.X and Microsoft IIS.

Removal instructions for all current and recent Symantec antivirus products, including the Symantec AntiVirus and Norton AntiVirus product lines, can be found here. Remember to always have an antivirus scanner installed and updated regularly. Let's hope for a just as quiet week in week 48!

Galaxynet votes on new Net-Com

Thursday, November 21 2002 by Hardy

Galaxynet`s managment, also called Net-Com consists of 9 members. 4 of them are elected by the Founders, and the 5 left is nominated by global operators, for then to be voted in by the admins of each servers. Only two members can be operators, the 7 others must be current admins.

This year the founder elected Gawyn, Rikske, flyyyie and rev. Nominated and voted in are Rich, dave_s, Spades, cybernaut and gypsylady. These people will be the managment of Galaxynet in the year 2003.

If you are intrested in the Galaxynet history, you can find it here.

Bersirc 2 series under development

Thursday, November 21 2002 by cArLiLLoS

Bersirc IRC client developer has resumed work and stopped 1.x releases to now focus on the development of 2.x series. There isn't a public 2.0 beta available yet but there will be one hopefully in early 2003. Good news for the users who are delighted with this alternative to the old big clients.

FBI monitors IRC channel for child porn

Wednesday, November 20 2002 by Asmo

News site Koin.com reports on FBI agents monitoring IRC channels for child ponography.

I just found that child pornography server in about 30 seconds, and accessed it within that same period of time" said Christopher Kitto of the Beaverton Police Department to Koin.com

Fire disables serverroom of University of Twente

Wednesday, November 20 2002 by Asmo

A fire broke out this morning near the server room of the University of Twente in Holland. The dutch radio reports that the server room itself is not yet in fire, but it is disabled for savety reasons.

No personal injuries or casualties have happened, but several services are unavailable to the public, those include security.debian.org and non-us.debian.org, as well as the mIRC forums. The website of mIRC reports that the forum and mailinglists will highly likely be down for a few days. Also the IRCNet based server irc.snt.utwente.nl was hosted in this serverroom, and will be available for undetermined time.

A picture can be found here. A video fragment can be seen here

Update: Apparently the server room is lost now, but the radio also reports that all important data have been saved with backups. Let's just hope that also includes all the Debian and IRC related sites/databases etc.

New version of IRSII

Wednesday, November 20 2002 by Asmo

For those that are using IRSII, the modular text based *nix IRC client, its finally time to update to the long awaited 0.8.6 version.

New features include support for the IRCNet's !channel channeltype, support for SLL, DCC send qeue's and others.

Oper spills some nice information regarding future ircu releases

Tuesday, November 19 2002 by Asmo

Isomer, one of the coodinators of the ircu project, asked users on the Undernet network today for some feedback regarding future features in ircu, the ircd software which is used on Undernet, but also (in modified form) on QuakeNet, and many smaller networks.

During the session he also let some light shine on interesting features we will see soon, or (probally) never, on Undernet:

- Nick registration won't be part of ircu. Seems the majority of the users as well voted a strong no for that, and with historical reasons in mind, it is highly unlikely this will ever taken place on Undernet. Isomer also hints it would be hard already to let such a event take place in a orderly fashion.

- Users requested the addition for the +c mode on channels, which allows users to strip colors from text. Isomer says it would only add more burden to the servers, while practically all IRC clients have a function to strip colors from incomming messages.

- Ban exceptions is also a feature that is highly unlikely to be implemented anytime soon. Apparently in practice it would fill up banlists faster, instead of the goal, reduce the ammount of bans.

- IPv6 is something the coders have been working on, patches are currently under testing. But the problem is that a server either has to be IPv4, OR IPv6, which is the reason that there are no IPv6 servers available yet on Undernet.

- Last lot of users requested is the implementation of half ops. Half ops are ops that do not have all the priviledges from full ops (they can not ban for example, or do other channel modes). Isomer says Run has been coding on a similar feature which will be released soon.

Finally Isomer ends with a request. Undernet is working to get the abuse on the network down as much as possible. So if you see any abuse on the network, ranging from ban evasion to floodnets, trojans, etc., please report them in the usual channels (#cservice, #zt, #nastrand, #arlington, etc) and they will take a look at them and figure out where to put their efforts as coders in.

New Klient version

Monday, November 18 2002 by Asmo

For those users betatesting the Klient IRC client for Windows there is a little more light at the end of the bug fixing tunnel.

Version 2.0.10 was released with a small bug, which was found and corrected in 2 hours which leads us to the current version 2.0.11, consisting of only bug fixes.

Klient is a shareware client which will cost $24.95USD after the initial 30 day free trial period.

This is for the h0m3b0yZzzzzzz

Monday, November 18 2002 by Asmo

There is a first for everything, and today was just a perfect day for another first For a while back there was this website that had song text's that where about IRC. Unfortunally the website got lost over time.

Today I got a mail from FoRc, who told me about his friend doing a rap about girls on IRC, or, as he prefers to calls them, IRC bitches. To download and listen to the .mp3, hit with your mouse right here.

Parental guidance recommended, explicit lyrics


New edition of the Undernet Newsletter

Sunday, November 17 2002 by cArLiLLoS

Are you a newcomer on the IRC? Do you think the IRC is a wilderness? Is your computer acting in a strange way lately? TurboPIRCH replacing PIRCH? Read about and more in the October edition of the Undernet Newsletter, now available here and with a new neat layout.

IT technician used IRC to collect and distribute child pornography

Saturday, November 16 2002 by Asmo

22 year old Richard Mark Emmerson, a IT technician living and working in Sutton England used up to 5 hours a day collecting and distributing child pornography using IRC.

Besides the 5000 images on his homecomputer, he also used the network of the company he worked for to store the images.

The offender pleaded guilty a month ago, and has been convicted to a two and a half year jail.

Dutch police allowed to break in unsecured computers

Saturday, November 16 2002 by Asmo

The police in the Netherlands is allowed to break into computers, if the computer in question was not secured enough, so has court decided in The Hague yesterday. A man is convicted for possesion of child porn which was kept on the computer.

The crime was detected by a user on the Internet who came by accident on the victim's computer. Court has now decided that police is allowed to enter a computer without permission from court if they do not have to bypass firewall or other security software.

If this could be a start to secure computers who have been infected by DDoS clients over security flaws in browsers and Operating Systems remains to be seen, but it would open up oppurtunities...

EFnet`s Austria server delinked.

Friday, November 15 2002 by Hardy

Earlier today efnet.dkom.at was delinked from EFnet by the admins of the server. Accourding to one of the admin, kurd, the server was delinked due to some administrative problems.

EFnet is the 4th biggest IRC Network in the world and efnet.dkom.at held close to 500 users when it was delinked.

IRC plays a key role in the distribution of pirated movies

Friday, November 15 2002 by Asmo

It should not really come as a suprise, but the new Harry Potter movie is already pirated, and available for those who prefer to watch their movies on their computer screen, instead of the big silver screen.

Internet.com, also includes the role IRC plays in the distribution of such pirated films;

"a bootlegged movie file goes through a certain hierarchical process over the Internet. First the file will make an appearance what are referred to as "top sites," which are limited access sites that only the piracy elite can access. Then the film file will trickle down to Internet Relay Channels (IRC), and from there the file will travel to more popular peer-to-peer sites like Kazaa and Morpheus, eventually making its way to email and Instant Messaging services."

IRC chat client for your Nokia 7650

Friday, November 15 2002 by Asmo

Ah! How is THIS for progression! Norwegian website Infosync reports on WirelessIRC 1.52, a IRC client made for the Nokia 7650.

"As an IRC client, WirelessIRC allows users to connect to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) networks all over the world, where they can chat with thousands of other people that have connected either via PCs, mobile phones or handhelds. WirelessIRC provides menu shortcuts to most common IRC commands, and with version 1.52 offers users the option to send and receive files by means of a DCC relay proxy. Possible applications include taking a picture or recording a voice note, for then to send it to another person on the network."

At $9.95USD the price is as small as the hardware it is running on. Get those thumbs going people...

Weekly virus report

Friday, November 15 2002 by Asmo

Just when you decide to pack the virus reports into easy to chunk weekly reports, you just have 1 mentionable virus a week! Well, here we go for this week...

W32.Jonbarr.C@mm is, as the name shows (@mm) a mass mailing virus. But if it will find any of the next programs installed, it will also use them to spread themself further; mIRC, KaZaA, eDonkey2000, Bearshare, and Morpheus. Besides overwriting .htm files in your Internet cache, and mailing any email adresses it finds in that cache it is fortunally not doing a lot more.

It is very good practise to have a good anti-virus scanner installed, AND updated regurally. New virusses are released daily, so make sure to update your anti-virus at least once a week.
A good free to use online scanner is House Call, simply click the scan without registering link, and follow the instructions.

Teachers complain about "Instant messaging" talk

Thursday, November 14 2002 by Asmo

Every 6 or so months we see a site reporting on this. This time it is the Newark Advocate who brings a story on how english teachers are gruweling over their student's style of writing, heavily influenced with chat style of abbrevations like; brb, l8r, lol and nvm.

"most people would be shocked" and "It's scary" are some of the expressions said by a 26 year old teacher from Columbus, USA.

In IRCJunkie's opinion its the signs of a living language. Any language that is still in use to communicate is undergoing the changes of time and fashion.

mIRC releases new servers.ini

Thursday, November 14 2002 by Asmo

These turbulent times where servers come and go due to DDoS or financially restructuring it is always a good idea to keep up to date with what servers you can use for your favourite IRC network(s).

The popular Windows based mIRC have released a new servers.ini file.

New Visual IRC version is out

Wednesday, November 13 2002 by Asmo

The fans of this program will be pleased to hear that there is finally a new version out. Version 2.0 RC4 of Visual IRC has a long list of new features and fixes and seems to be well worth the long wait.

New putty version

Tuesday, November 12 2002 by Asmo

The popular freeware SSH and Telnet client Putty has released a new version.

Most important changes are security and stability related. The security changes include a change in the way random numbers are generated, and as such, it is adviced you upgrade to this new version on your earliest convenience.

QuakeNet reaches 140k user mark

Tuesday, November 12 2002 by Asmo

QuakeNet reached a new record, 141760 concurrent users according to statistics website NetSplit.de.

NetSplit.de connects each 3 hours to a IRC network and uses the collected data for its statistics website. The website from QuakeNet self shows the userrecord which is set at 142948 concurrent users.

irc.du.se and irc.aloha.net returned to EFnet after a few weeks of vacation

Monday, November 11 2002 by Hardy

irc.du.se, hosted by Dalarna University in Sweden returned to EFnet yesterday after a few weeks offline due to hardware problems.

Also, irc.aloha.net, hosted by Hawaii online returned after a few weeks offline earlier today. The server is still on trial and there have been no official comment on why it had downtime. The server was linked 29. October this year and disappeard the day after.

There is light for NetSplit.de

Friday, November 8 2002 by Asmo

"It will stay alive!" screams the news page of the statictics site NetSplit.de. Which is good news really fast, considering only 2 days ago the webmaster of the site emailed me saying he probally have to stop the site.

In a reaction Andreas Gelhausen, webmaster of NetSplit told IRCJunkie that he got a overwhelming responce.

"Currently I try to answer each of them. I still have a lot of unreplied mails in my folder, Andreas replied.

One included a serious offer on a co-location in Germany, where Andreas lives.

Eggdrop TCL "NO! autorejoin v1.1c" exploit

Friday, November 8 2002 by Asmo

In case you are using the NO! autorejoin v1.1c script you have some more configuration to do. Apparently nickerne, who scripted this script, left a vunerability in that would allow users to kill your bot. According to Slennox's eggdrop page, the vunerability involves the use of the utimer command, who can be responsible for serious security threats if used uncarefully with other commands.

This script is meant to ban users who have rejoin on kick enabled in their clients.

Italian language for Eggdrop 1.6.12

Friday, November 8 2002 by Asmo

For the Italian users of the popular IRC bot Eggdrop we have good news, the website Slennox's eggdrop page announced the release of Italian language files. You can get them from the eggdrop files page.

Weekly virus report

Friday, November 8 2002 by Asmo

From this week on we will pack new virii that are discovered the week before into 1 neat post for you to keep track off.

This week was fairly quiet, and only had one really nasty virus that used IRC to spread itself as well, W32.HLLW.Oror.B@mm. This mass mailing worm will sent itself to any email adresses it sees in incomming emails. It will also spread with the aid of mIRC, network shares and mapped drives. The worm will find and delete files belonging to firewalls and anti virus products.

It is a good idea to have a up to date anti virus product running at all times. On the links page we have links to several of these, including freeware ones!
For a one time full system scan you can use Housecall, simply click the scan without registering link.

DDoS Kiddies get millions of potential DDoS clients

Friday, November 8 2002 by Asmo

Every single citizen of South Korea will have a broadband Internet connection, the government of South Korea has decided. At this moment, 20% of the country already have a broadband connection.

In South Korea, people are making more use of the Internet then they watch TV.

2005 is the year the government set as goal to complete this task. The idea is to provide at least 1MBit/s. But 15,5 million users will get a 20MBit/s connection.

South Korean hosts (.kr) are well known to be compromised a lot on IRC, being abused as open proxies, and being used in DDoS attacks.

Power outage plagues IRC

Thursday, November 7 2002 by Asmo

A severe power outage plagued Internet in north-west Europe yesterday evening. A explosion in a tranformer-house had as result that 80% of Hollands capital Amsterdam did not had power for about 2,5 hours.

The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) is located in this part of Amsterdam. Several IRC servers being hosted on locations on or near the AMS-IX were unable to operate for some time.

Sengaia, from the managment team running the Undernet servers in Amsterdam told IRCJunkie:

"Both Amsterdam servers ran on diesel power for 2,5 hours last night. AMS-IX was gone, but they (the Amsterdam* IRC servers, ed) were linked to IRC"

Dutch police and electricity company Nuon have no idea yet how the explosion could have taken place.

Popular IRC statistics page maybe has to stop

Wednesday, November 6 2002 by Asmo

Andreas Gelhausen, webmaster of Netsplit.de sent me a mail this evening, announcing a probable quit of that website. This website specialises on statistics concerning IRC networks, and is widely used by IRC websites and network admins for relevant data on traffic on IRC networks.

Besides being specialised in statistics Andreas also offers other functions like the ability to search through topics and channel names.

What NetSplit is searching for is a sponsor that can help with providing bandwidth. On a page Andreas made for the occasion he explains:

"If you have eventually connected to an IRC server in past, you might have seen a message like "IRC is free". Many ISPs run their IRC servers without a real benefit and established the basis for the biggest internet community system.

In August 1998 netsplit.de's IRC statistics started with the same motto and preserved it into the present. Now, at the end of year 2002, this attitude isn't only a big problem for the expansion but also for the existence of this non-commercial statistics service. In fact this month could be the last one for http://irc.netsplit.de/. That's the point you can come into play...

Are you working for an ISP? Do you like the Internet Relay Chat and/or this statistics service? Have you bought a certain amount of traffic volume and don't know how to use it? Then you might be interested to sponsor the future of this website. =:^)"

If you know of a way to help NetSplit out, get in contact with them then, and let's all hope this excellent website wont dissapear from the Internet.

EFNet reaches a new userrecord

Wednesday, November 6 2002 by Asmo

EFNet reached a new personal userrecord. Hardy, webmaster of EFNet and reporter of this site, wrote on the EFNet's website:

"Less then two months after EFnet reached 100 000 simultaneous connections we today reached another barrier, 110 000 concurrent connections!"

Undernet switches forum software once more

Wednesday, November 6 2002 by Asmo

As reported a few days ago, Undernet switched forum software.

That new software made the dates of old posts corrupted. Also in the new software there was a serious security bug that could lead to hackers being able to compromise the server.

In order to fix this problem a newer version was installed that unfortunally corrupted the database beyond useability. A backup of the forum posts from 31st october is now used, which means the posts of the last 5 days are unfortunally gone.

DalNet's CEO taz is back

Wednesday, November 6 2002 by Asmo

In september of last year the CEO position of DalNet went from taz to dalvenjah.

IRC newswebsite IRCNews now reports the position is back again in taz's hands.

It looks like the current DDoS problems currently plaguing DalNet are at least partly responsible for this change of positions, as taz told IRCNews:

"I look at the admin mailing list, and there's no more laughter. Forget the titles. I don't care what it takes, DALnet is going to refocus itself as a team and get back to the job of being a great IRC network."

IRC client news

Tuesday, November 5 2002 by Asmo

Two IRC client updates for today:

XChat released development version 1.9.4 today. This is not a version meant for the public, but meant as a step closer towards the next major release, 2.0.0. Only a *nix version is released for now.

Secondly I got a mail for the developer of SavIRC, a IRC client I have never had any experience with or heard of before... He released version 1.9 yesterday, and the feature list looks promising; cross platform, multiserver capable, scripting in TCL/TK etc. Might be worth to check out if your the adventurous type

QuakeNet changes policy on lightweight channel service L

Sunday, November 3 2002 by Asmo

Besides their main channel service Q, QuakeNet introduced the "lightweight" channel service L a while back. The idea was, quoting oper qoreQ:

"L was introduced to serve channels that didn't qualify to get Q, but still needed channel protection. We see it as more secure than getting an eggdrop from some bot service."

Today the website announced that the way L can expire from a channel has been changed. If a channel has been below 4 users for too long, or no one with a channel level has been in the channel for more then 20 days, L will automatically part the channel.

On the comments page this had lead to various responces. Several smaller channels that are only active in the weekends, or for example a few employees from a company who use it to communicate on the workplace are negatively affected by this new expiry rule.

The reason to introduce this new rule was as qoreQ told IRCJunkie:

"We've just noticed people registering every channel they can think of and then not using them, just holding the names. So, this is to prevent that."

On wondering why a user is able to register 20 channels qoreQ responded:

"Well, I'd say that if we only allowed 1 channel people would complain about that too. But, the requirements aren't exactly steep. There's a limit to how many channels your account can have flags on in L, and that's 20."

You can get a username on QuakeNet with a hotmail email adress, making it possible to have multiple accounts holding 20 channels each. IRCJunkie wonders if it would not have been better for only allowing registration of usernames with a ISP pop3 email account, which will make abusing services like L much harder.

"It's a pretty black and white issue, if the channel is used, then they can have and keep L, if not, then L leaves. You have to have 4 users to get L, I think it's resonable to have 4 users on the channel for a while, don't you?"

In the end you can not really argue that.

DalNet hostmaster blames lack of servers

Saturday, November 2 2002 by Asmo

As we reported two days ago, DalNet has pointed the round robin irc.dal.net to a non-functional IP 255.255.255.255, which will result in a error message Unable to connect (Can't assign requested address) to anyone who uses this to try and get connected to the network.

DalNet's hostmaster Wagahai (also known as Aaron) now blames the lack of servers to have a working round robin:

"It's pointed this way on purpose. We have no servers able to handle the load of being "irc.dal.net" so you need to use a server by it's name to connect."

He realizes that this could lead to confusement with especially novice IRC users:

"..unfortunately we have no other way to put a big message in the dns lookup which will tell people that we just don't have enough servers to handle the load of the "irc.dal.net" name."

A round robin will distribute a single domain over multiple IP's, so the load can be carried by more servers for that single domain.

A while ago a oper close to the DalNet admin team explained IRCJunkie how a Turkish person attacks DalNet with DDoS attack in a responce over a personal fight on that network. In the past DalNet has pointed irc.dal.net to the local IP 127.0.0.1 for example to keep the DDoS attacks away from their servers.

Undernet implements new forum software

Friday, November 1 2002 by Asmo

Undernet has implemented new forum software on it's website. A quote from Simba--, one of the webmasters in a news post announcing the new forum:

We have upgraded the undernet forum to a newer version for the benefit of our forum users.

The new version is much more userfriendly, easy to use and has many new features for you to use.

On contacting Simba-- if the dates on the old posts will be fixed he said it was impossible to fix those, so they will remain to be on that very famous date, 1 januari 1970.

W32.Appix.D.Worm

Friday, November 1 2002 by Asmo

Symantec reports on W32.Appix.D.Worm, a new worm that prepends itself to .bat, .com, .cmd, .exe, .scr, .pif, and .msi in the root folder of C: and .exe files in the Windows installation folder. It will also infect php, .phtml, and .php3 in various locations.

You can get infected by visitting infected websites, or on IRC, by accepting DCC sends from a infected user. It also has its own SMTP server to send itself to all adresses found in the Windows Adress Book and Bat!'s email program adress book.
_________________
Asmo

webmaster www.IRC-Junkie.org