Posts for the 'IRC' Category (Feed for this category)

Let's get up to date

25th August, 2007     XBOX, Django, IRC, Life, Arch Linux, University,

So I noticed tonight that I haven't blogged in over a month, and decided it was about time I did.

Lately I have been working quiet a bit, especially now that I've finished Uni, and have lots of free time. In the other time, I've been working on implementing some changes for an IRC network, as well as test and try to document and get things in order.

I have started using del.icio.us, when I remember atleast, to record some of those sites which contain facts that you really want to store. I also wrote a importer and application so this can be viewed (and commented on!), on this site. You can view it at www.nullis.net/links, tho it does not look very pretty.. yet!

Speaking of Uni, my graduation has been finalised and I am able to add B.CompSc. to my name after the 25th of September! Mind you, I am going to end up spending more than $150 on just plaque and photos from the graduation. But they do look good!

Meanwhile, DNS for all my domains, (except this one ironically), has been switched over to being hosted by myself. For some of the sites, I am using ZoneEdit still as backup nameservers to increase reliability.

I also recently got the Die Hard Game for the XBOX. Graphics suck. When I put it on to play, I had to check I wasn't playing the SEGA...

Also, Facebook is rather addictive! That is all..

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Disturbing songs of 2006

20th June, 2006     IRC, WTF,

Well, if the words to the song, are really what they have been translated to be, then this is probably going to be one of the most disturbing songs of all time.

Boten Anna Music Clip with English Subs

Who would've thought an IRC Bot would have a song written about it.

Edit: Unfortunately, the words are real, and so is the song. Thanks for confirming the fear Wikipedia.

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April Fools Day Jokes gone totally wrong, and caught on logs.

2nd April, 2006     IRC, Rants, WTF,

So April Fools Day, has been and gone again, and a number of people are left standing there, looking like fools, either because they got suckered into another Joke, or their joke was so not funny, that it made them look bad.

Case in point: Rob Levin's "freenode is shutting down" 'joke', or as it should really be known, act of stupidity.

At 22:00 GMT, lilo (Rob Levin's nick on freenode), decided to send the following notice to every client on the freenode network (that's about 25,000 clients atleast)

[freenode] -lilo(i=levin@freenode/staff/pdpc.levin)- [Global Notice] Hmmm. You know, I could do an April Fool's Day joke, but maybe instead we should make this a group effort. Let's all just go to irc.oftc.net channel #oftc, and tell them that freenode has shut down and has repointed its servers to OFTC, and ask if they're going to be adding more facilities to handle the load. 8)

Well the events that unfolded from there, include 200 or so freenode users, joining the OFTC IRC Network, to carry out Rob Levin's 'prank'. While, this was not the 25,000 users that Rob had obviously been looking for (he did say that everyone should go and do it), the people that did join, did disrupt OFTC's network and #oftc channel for atleast 30 minutes (even tho if you asked Rob, it was only 5-10 minutes). And by disrupt, we mean that people connecting, were having difficulties, and there was also server lag, due to the great number of connects and data being sent at once.

OFTC people were not impressed and who can blame them.

You can see a log of the events here and screenshots of someone's IRC Client during the event on the following links: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

To me, these actions are similar to a Denial of Service attack. Or more so, a botnet controller, telling the bots in his botnet to go and connect to an IRC Network and flood a channel. (in this case it was a global notice, telling the not-as-smart to go and annoy people in a channel and flood - the evidence is in the logs.)

Now for a little bit of a log clipping:

<praetorian> oh, so you have no problem to next year or so, having people do the same to here? :-) <lilo> praetorian: now that you've told me, it would hardly be a prank <lilo> praetorian: sort of sounds a little angry

From this litttle clipping, you can obviously see from this, that asking if freenode minds having such a 'joke' next year, played on it, is not being nice and asking first, it seems that doing so is instead telling freenode that you plan on disrupting it's service. Come again?

The other point to note is, that Rob Levin, as President of the PDPC, and thus head of freenode staff, would know that OFTC exists, and is a rival network to what freenode tries to obtain (an open-source dedicated 'discussion' network). Thus this 'prank' can easily been seen as a way of causing problems for OFTC, under the guise of it being an April Fools Day joke. While Rob says it had nothing to do with the fact that OFTC is the rival, the question still remains, because no one will really ever know Rob Levin's reasons behind the 'prank'.

Edit: the IRC log snippet i pasted got eaten by the HTML tag monsters.

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In other news...

22nd March, 2006     IRC, Life,

It seems that a 22 year old Victorian man has been arrested for his attacks on Australian IRC Networks.

It's glad to see the AHTCC and other departments getting involved and stopping these guys who just seem to want to destroy things for all of us.

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On Engin and VOIP and !Sleeping

4th January, 2006     IRC, Life,

Andrew, It may not be much, but I have a log of a IRC Chat that took between members of the AtomicMPC IRC Channel, and Steve and Rudd from Engin if it reveals any answers (probably won't).

Meanwhile, to more important matters, cheers for the early rising links. This was posted at 20 past 4 in the morning. Not because I just woke up, but because I haven't slept yet :-)

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#atomicmpc and Engin

25th October, 2005     IRC, Planet Atomic,

Steve and Ruud from Engin visited #atomicmpc tonight for an hour to chat about VOIP, and all things related.

An online copy of the chat log is available

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Irssi 0.8.10 RC6 out now

29th September, 2005     IRC,

Seems after a long time, a new release version of irssi 0.8.10 is out. You can [get it]GetIrssi] at their website, and also have a read of the ChangeLog.

Interesting to note that one of the major changes is

Removed 'freenode' from the network list

But then really, that does not come as that much of a surprise.

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Google, Talk and more.

24th August, 2005     Google, IRC, Life, Linux, WWW,

For those that have been living in a cave this week, Google has announced it's Instant Messenger client, namely 'Google Talk'. While it is in beta (is anything at google not in beta?), thanks to its use of the Jabber/XMPP protocol, it means that already there are clients for all operating systems available (well, any that supports Jabber, naturally).

This means that you don't need to download yet another IM Client, or wait for GAIM or BitlBee, to update the source, to include the protocol and functionality for it. However, BitlBee users should note, that they will need to apply this patch to order to be able to use the gmail service, due to minor account differences in gmail's set up. See www.bitlbee.org for more info. (Yes port 5223, the default Jabber port works for me, where 5222, the google talk port, doesn't).

Meanwhile, I now have another means of contact that I will never use. I do use bitlbee for my instant message conversations, as it moulds nicely into my IRC Client, but i still converse mostly thru IRC. I guess IM is just there for the people who need to contact me and are bedazzled by all the shiny parts of IM clients (fuck you emoticons).

And while I have your attention, on a side note, has anyone noticed that Google is doing similar things to what Microsoft do, in regards to how they name their applications or services. That being, naming the product simply after the task it does, in order for it to become more "easier to remember", I would imagine. To compare:

Microsoft Products: Word, Paint, Office, Messenger Google Products: Talk, Search, Desktop Search, Alerts.

The only products which seem to have a unique names, are products they have gained due to the purchase of/from other companies.

Your thoughts on google talk and the rest are welcomed.

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Is IRC, Isn't freenode.

9th August, 2005     IRC, Life, Rants,

freenode, an IRC network by any other name (no, I will not call it a "Discussion network").

I hang out on freenode, to talk with some friends that I have made over the years, and also to get help and assist with some open source projects, namely Ubuntu and irssi, when I can.

However, I am most likely classified by Rob Levin, as one of the people he calls a 'Traditional IRC User'. What is a Traditional IRC User? Well you can read his thoughts on them on this wiki page. Do that before reading on. It should be noted that Rob Levin has not always been popular with everybody.

OK. Now that you have read the wiki page (and the quotes which are considerably biased to what a Traditional IRC User would call an 'idiot'), you might understand some of my disagreements with the stance.

The reason I have mentioned Traditional IRC Users, is because the following is going to detail annoyances that Traditional IRC Users and myself are going to have with freenode in a very short period of time.

NOIDPREFIX

Many IRC networks use nickname registration services. I don't have a problem with nickname registration services as they have their benefits and disadvantages. However, freenode will soon be implementing a policy, which will mean that people will not only be able to register a nick they want, but by doing so, all variants of it are automatically registered to them. This means if you register the nickname 'foo', you also have the exclusive right to own nicknames with 'foo' in them. For example, and not limited to.

foo foo_ foo` foo foo-1 [foo] foo|ATHOME foo[WORK]

People can say "this will help, because I then i don't have to register each of those nicknames", but their is a major problem with this.

Say you wanted the nickname 'Foo_Fighter', well, you could not have it, because someone, in this case, already owns the nickname 'foo'. Why? Well because 'foo' is registered to someone, and 'Foo_Fighter' is a variant of 'foo'. Sure, he could use 'FooFighter', but that may already be taken.

A more problematic example, is one expressed by The_Tick (I think you can see already what his problem is going to be).

The_Tick also makes a good point about nick changes being used to indicate if you are away or not. Something again, that Traditional IRC Users have complained about before.

I know a number of people who are going to have similar problems, and would prefer to use the nicknames they already have for years, then having to pick another one. It would be easier in these cases for us to use elsewhere, simply because no other network has problems of such a scale, other than freenode.

I could add more to this, but i suggest instead that you complain to policy@freenode.net, especially if you use the network, to complain about these changes.

You can see the full policy draft on the freenode site.

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