Phil – GeekShed IRC

New SSL Certificate

Phil — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 03:19:54 +0000

We’ve finally splashed out on a Wildcard SSL certificate for the geekshed.net domain. We have applied this to the site, a few subdomain sites, and all of the IRC servers.

What does this mean for you? Well, the most notable change is that all of our IRC servers now have an SSL certificate which is trusted by all sensible operating systems. If your IRC client ever throws up a certificate error when you are connecting to GeekShed, you may not be connecting to our servers – rather, possibly, a malicious imitation.

This is applied to the BNC server(s) also, however it won’t be shown as valid unless you remove the first . from the server you connect to – e.g. lucifer.bnc.geekshed.net goes to luciferbnc.geekshed.net.

You can find out more about using SSL on GeekShed at http://www.geekshed.net/2010/03/what-is-ssl-what-benefits-does-it-offer-and-how-do-i-use-it/

GeekShed relies on the generous donations of its users in order to implement features such as this, which benefit all of our users. Why not consider making a donation today?

Server map updated

Phil — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:30:12 +0000

We have just updated the server map. We have had such a massive turnover of servers in the past few months that it became very quickly outdated. You can find it at http://www.geekshed.net/servers/.

BNCs Moved

Phil — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:25:25 +0000

We have, tonight, moved the BNCs from their previous unreliable homes onto a new server. Your previous connection credentials should work, as before. We hope the new server will be more reliable and less prone to downtime.

Any questions, ask us in #help

Mibbit Hacked

Phil — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:07:13 +0000

We write to report emerging news of certain elements of Mibbit (an AJAX IRC client service) being hacked. The proof of hack is further backed up by Mibbit’s official statement.

Because of the nature of Mibbit’s front end, your web browser cannot connect directly to IRC. Rather, it has to connect via a Mibbit back end service in order to make a connection. This is comparable in some ways to connecting via a dodgy Russian proxy. The intermediate party (Mibbit in this case and a dodgy Russian in the case of the proxy) can view all transmissions made to IRC and do as they please with that data.

For you, as GeekShed users, this should flag up some major concerns. The first of these is that Mibbit appears to log all private messages. Mibbit has refuted these claims and stated that private messages are only logged when permission has been given by the user. GeekShed questions the legitimacy of this as both parties should surely be complicit in the logging of their conversations on a 3rd party server. We can only assume that this includes messages you sent to GeekShed’s services (NickServ, ChanServ, etc.) when registering and identifying to your nicknames and channels.

We are, as an immediate precaution, recommending that anyone who has registered their nickname or ever identified to it, using Mibbit, changes their password as soon as possible. If you are using the same password for other services such as Facebook, Twitter, E-Mail, etc. we strongly suggest that you change these passwords also to avoid these accounts being compromised.

We also strongly suggest that our users cease to use Mibbit at their earliest convenience. GeekShed offers a flash alternative and also fully supports use of the lightirc client.

To change the password of your nickname, use the following command, when you are identified to that nickname:

/NS SET PASSWORD yournewpasshere

To change the password of your channel, use the following command, when you are identified to the channel founder’s nickname:

/CS SET PASSWORD yournewpasshere

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to find us in #help.

Tonight’s Problems

Phil — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:42:08 +0000

It’s been a rough few hours. We are sorry for this. An exploit was found in a 3rd party services module and used against us. This allowed the corruption of the access lists of 2 channels. Although it is fairly obvious from the code that an exploit caused by flawed logic exists, this has gone unnoticed for almost 3 years and it is expected that many more IRC networks will be affected by this.

We will shortly carry out a full audit of all 3rd party modules to check for similar exploits in those. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Welcome CornishNerd

Phil — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:59:57 +0000

CornishNerd has recently kindly accepted our offer to join the GeekShed staff team. He will be primarily responsible for the forums in a bid to make them an active part of the community. Network administration is not an easy job and we are thankful for the time he has dedicated to us.

P.S. I realise this is the same as the post I did for Brigitte with the name and gender changed. Why reinvent the wheel, eh?

Welcome Brigitte

Phil — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:18:50 +0000

Brigitte has recently kindly accepted our offer to join the GeekShed staff team. She will be primarily responsible for the forums in a bid to make them an active part of the community. Network administration is not an easy job and we are thankful for the time she has dedicated to us.

Recent Downtime

Phil — Wed, 04 May 2011 08:41:46 +0000

The more observant of you may have noticed us suffering from some major netsplits lately. GeekShed has typically been a stable network because of the pro-active tactics of its staff in resolving server issues such that they have minimal effect on our users.

We have, recently, been hit with large scale Denial of Service attacks which have crippled our servers. A number of servers have had to delink as the attacks are affecting other services that run on those servers.

We are making attempts presently to re-evaluate our infrastructure and will hold a meeting later today to decide on the best course of action. We do not have the finances to purchase DDOS-protected servers and, as such, are very limited in what we can do.

It is completely unknown to us who is launching the attack or what their motives are, but we ask them to kindly cease these attacks. We are a donation-funded service who are simply trying to provide people with an enjoyable experience.

EDIT: New infrastructure has been put in place and we are restructuring the network as best we can. We hope to have full service resumed shortly.

Channel topic on your site – using Javascript

Phil — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 23:49:19 +0000

We have set up a JSONP service to allow you to use a simple bit of Javascript to get your GeekShed channel topic on your website. This has been possible for a while with PHP (http://www.geekshed.net/2009/10/topic-rss/), which provides a more flexible solution. This, however, cannot be used on hosting services that do not support PHP. The Javascript method works in all modern browsers and doesn’t require anything special on your hosting server.

All you need do is paste the following code into your page’s HTML where you require your topic to be shown, change phil to your own channel name (without the #) and style it all appropriately:

If you’re stuck, ask in #help.

TOS Change

Phil — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:05:50 +0000

We have today, after much discussion, changed our terms of service. The reason for this is that the way it was previously done was confusing for users. The terms of service were previously called “Rules” and featured prominently on our site. Many users confused these with a definitive set of laws for which punishment would surely be issued if they were broken. This is not the case. They are a set of guidelines to ensure GeekShed remains “a free to use and family-friendly Internet Relay Chat network”.

Some parts of the terms of service are legacy remnants which have been removed due to no longer being relevant. Others have been refined to make them more clear. We have also removed the following clause:

Do not send Private Messages, Notices, and or CTCP requests to a user without his or her permission.

This has always, throughout the history of IRC, been considered common courtesy. It was, on reflection, an oversight to have this in our terms of service and as the network has grown, we are becoming unable to handle the number of complaints about PM without permission.

In the near future, we will post an article for newer users of IRC which details the expected standards of behavior and common courtesies – ‘Netiquette’. EDIT: here it is!

Our refined TOS can be found at http://www.geekshed.net/tos/. If you have any questions on this, feel free to ask in #help or as a comment on this post.