[Asmo]

Real MyrcCops?

Friday, June 25 2004 by Asmo

This one slipped past my attention before I went away on vacation, but it is here nonetheless; UK's National Crime Squad Assistant Chief Constable Jim Gamble is proposing to have real police authorities to patrol inside "Internet chat rooms". We can only assume that IRC channels will be included in that. They will be recognizable by a special icon.

Many IRC networks present them self as a "common carrier" and are not monitoring for illegal activities, as they are only providing the network for its users to chat on. As an analogy, a telephone company will not monitor conversations either for illegal activities, as they also only provide the connection.

If users engaged with criminal activity on IRC turn to the administration of such networks, they are usually encouraged by IRC administration to take the evidence (logs) to their local police.

The article can be found here. All that is left for me is the question how they are going to implement that icon on IRC ...
There have been 23 comments added to this article.

Eggdrop jumps to version 1.9

Thursday, June 24 2004 by Asmo

The Eggheads website reports: "We have renamed Eggdrop 1.7 to 1.9 -- this is because when 1.9 is ready it will be released as Eggdrop 2.0.0 because of the significant changes. It might be a bit confusing when 2.0.0 is released because the previous development had a project called Eggdrop2 which did not turn out so well. We are making every effort to not follow in their footsteps and to build a program that we are proud of and that you can be proud of too."

More about the changes coming up in this version can be read in the interview we had with guppy, maintainer of the 1.6 tree. This interview has originally been published in September 2002, showing the extended period of time which has been put in the development of this version.
There have been 7 comments added to this article.

Vacation

Friday, June 11 2004 by Asmo

I will be gone for vacation from tomorrow till the 24th of this month. Most likely there will not be a whole lot of updates on this site.

As I can not monitor any comments posted, and I regularly have to moderate, I have to disable the ability to post comments on news posts until I am back from vacation.

Seeya all then!
There have been 0 comments added to this article.

QuakeNet's Q sees 3 new commands

Thursday, June 10 2004 by Asmo

QuakeNet's website announced the addition of three new commands.

"The REQUESTOWNER command allows you to request ownership of a channel on which there are no owners. If there are channel masters present you must also be a master, otherwise you need only operator privileges on the channel. To request ownership, type: /msg Q REQUESTOWNER #channel."

The RECOVER command is similar to L's RECOVER command, in that it is used to reclaim your channel in the event of a takeover. The command will remove all modes set on a channel, including bans, operator statuses, etc.

The third command, CHANLEV command will give a status report of the number of owners, masters, operator on a given channel.
There have been 3 comments added to this article.

Global security awareness

Thursday, June 10 2004 by Asmo

Today USA Today published an article about the general security problems surrounding Windows systems in use at households.

"Internet bad guys are boring in where last month's Sasser worm left off. Sasser put a spotlight on yet another security hole in Microsoft's Windows computer operating system by knocking down business, government and transportation systems around the globe."

The background research for this article seems a bit flawed here and there, for example their name for script kiddies, bot herders, are being qualified as hacking specialists. Despite that it seems like a good change that the general mainstream media are helping to make global awareness that the average computer user should patch their systems regularly, and install security software.

The writer of this article got all his family and friends using Thunderbird and Firefox as email/www combo, and helped them installing security software (firewall and antivirus) which is available free. For some links check out the security section on the links page.
There have been 2 comments added to this article.

"Oops!" at GalaxyNet

Tuesday, June 8 2004 by Asmo

From time to time the inbox for the news tips are being flooded with tips on a certain happening. Yesterday it was about a rumored closure of GalaxyNet, an IRC network holding about 15000 users at the daily peak times ranked number 13 at Netsplit.de.

As the graphs show yesterday suddenly all activity went down to zero. It did not take long before rumors started that GalaxyNet would be shutting down completely.

IRC-Junkie got in contact with the registrant, Mark Finkle, who explained it is basically a pretty large "oops!"

"Spam filtering ate the network solutions renewal requests. I didn't know the domain had expired until I got an email from an admin this morning. The domains has been renewed and normal operations should resume sometime today."

So there you go! All operation will resume as quickly as possible. At the time of writing this article (3:00PM GMT) the website of the network was already back up.
There have been 1 comments added to this article.

XChat 2.0.9 released

Monday, June 7 2004 by Asmo

Version 2.0.9 of this popular cross platform client has been released. Among the changes we find a fix for the Socks5 overflow exploit and better support for Gnome 2.6.

You can find XChat here.
There have been 5 comments added to this article.

IRCNet server delinks

Friday, June 4 2004 by Asmo

"Unfortunately irc.netsurf.de will be delinked on the 1rst of July because of DDoS attacks against the server. The Sponsor, Easynet Deutschland, couldn't support this anymore, as the attacks were affecting their network" the website of IRCNet announces.

In a text file the server administration explain the reasoning behind the delink of the server, in the German language.

"From this side I would like to thank all those who with the use of DDoS over the last weeks destroyed a much loved, fast and stable server who served such a long period with just a single mouseclick on your DDoS-tool."

The server, irc.netsurf.de have been serving the IRCNet community since 1998.
There have been 16 comments added to this article.

mIRC 6.15 released

Friday, June 4 2004 by Asmo

The most popular IRC client used sees another update.

"The new version fixes quite a few small bugs found in the previous versions. We tried to focus on fixing things, making the mIRC 6 series more an more sturdy, and only few new features and functions have been added", the announcement says on the mIRC homepage making it clear this version is first most a bugfix release.

Some of the more important fixes/additions include improvement of the reload logs functionality to ensure they load the correct logs, SSL have been improved so on reconnection it would reconnect to a SSL port if previously a SSL connection was used and a small memory leak is fixed.

A complete list of changes in 6.15 can be found in the whatsnew.txt file.
There have been 15 comments added to this article.

jIRCii beta 6 released

Friday, June 4 2004 by Asmo

Raffi, the coder of jIRCii, got in contact with IRCJunkie to say beta 6 of his Java based IRC is released.

"Beta 6 has been released with mostly bug fixes, and a few additions. Additions include serveral keyboard shortcuts, a connect to irc on startup feature, minor scripting enhancements, and some bug fixes."

You can find jIRCii here.
There have been 0 comments added to this article.

Phishing Worm passing info onto IRC servers

Thursday, June 3 2004 by Asmo

On the Netcraft website an article have been published on the Phishing Worm "which auto-infects unpatched Windows systems with a keylogging trojan, steals online banking information, and secretly transmits data back to the fraudsters."

To get someone infected the worm makes use of the LSASS vulnerability, to which Microsoft has released a patch on the 11th of April.

The worm is collecting passwords for online banking, and collecting data entered in webforms, always good for passwords and the odd creditcard number.

"That information is sent to one of 11 geographically distributed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers, including eight different servers on the Undernet IRC network, which claims to have 45 servers in 35 countries."

Besides keeping your system always up to date with the latest patches, it is also vital to have an antivirus package installed to keep viruses out of the door, AND to update this package regularly. Even then if you are being infected, a firewall will prevent the virus to connect to the outside world. Both antivirus and firewall packages are available as freeware, we have some links on the links page.
There have been 2 comments added to this article.

Eggdrop 1.6.16 released

Wednesday, June 2 2004 by Asmo

The most popular bot used on IRC has been updated to version 1.6.16.

Some of the changes include removal of the IPv6 protocol which was badly implemented. It will return in a future version. Module coders will be delighted to hear more functions will be exported for their use. There is now support for EFNet's +E and +I modes. Support for more exotic channel operator symbols. And "Many, many bugfixes" have been fixed.

The security flaw reported by IRCJunkie on February the 10th has also been closed.

For a complete list of changes check out the changes file.

You can download Eggdrop here, and on Egghelp.org you can find a guide how to update your Eggdrop to this most current version.
There have been 4 comments added to this article.
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Asmo

webmaster www.IRC-Junkie.org