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BitchX

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BitchX
Developer(s)Colten Edwards (panasync) and Kevin Easton (caf)
Stable release1.2.1 (November 14, 2014; 9 years ago (2014-11-14)) [±]
Preview releaseBitchX-1.3 (January 1, 2013; 11 years ago (2013-01-01)) [±]
Repository
Written inC
Operating systemUnix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X
TypeIRC client
LicenseRevised BSD license
Websitewww.bitchx.org

BitchX /ˈbɪtʃɛks/ is a free IRC client[1] and has been considered to be the most popular ircII-based IRC client.[2] The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a script for the IrcII chat client.[2] It was converted to a program in its own right by panasync (Colten Edwards). BitchX 1.1 final was released in 2004. It is written in C and is a TUI application utilizing ncurses. GTK+ toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all Unix-like operating systems, and is distributed under a BSD license. It is originally based on ircII-EPIC[2] and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports IPv6,[3] multiple servers and SSL and a subset of UTF-8 (characters contained in ISO-8859-1) with an unofficial patch.[4]

BitchX has frequently been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.[1][5][6][7][8][9]

The latest official release is version 1.2

BitchX does not yet support Unicode.[10]

Security

It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before format string attacks became a well-known class of vulnerability.[11]

The previous version of BitchX, released in 2004, has security problems allowing remote IRC servers to execute arbitrary code on the client's machine (CVE-2007-3360, CVE-2007-4584).

On April 26, 2009, Slackware removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues.[12]

The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.[13][14][15]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "Opinion: Get online for (free) Linux support!". CNN. June 17, 1999. Retrieved Sep 29, 2009. ("If you're already using Linux, then you have your choice of several (IRC) clients. BitchX is a popular one.")
  2. ^ a b c Charalabidis, Alex (1999-12-15). "Unix Clients: BitchX". The Book of IRC: The Ultimate Guide to Internet Relay Chat (1st ed.). San Francisco, California: No Starch Press. pp. 44–45. ISBN 1-886411-29-8.
  3. ^ Peter Loshin (2004). IPv6: Theory, Protocol, and Practice. Morgan Kaufmann. p. 316.
  4. ^ "bitchx: Detail: 3204631 - Add UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 conversion in output text". SourceForge.net. 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2011-07-09.
  5. ^ Review:BitchX (Amiga) Archived 2018-12-07 at the Wayback Machine, IRCreviews.org, Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is favoured by many more experienced IRC users")
  6. ^ A Day in the Life of #Apache Archived 2016-03-16 at the Wayback Machine, OSDir.com (March 25, 2005), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("XChat, mIRC, and bitchx are several popular clients")
  7. ^ How to use IRC guide, Overclockersclub.com (Dec. 4, 2006), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("There are many different clients available, some of the more popular ones include BitchX, XChat, Trillian, BeserIRC, Klient ....")
  8. ^ What about P2P on *nix?, Broadbandreports.com (Sept. 13, 2002), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("There are several IRC clients for Linux. Among the best are X-Chat and BitchX.")
  9. ^ BitchX Configuration Guide, Linuxhelp.net (last updated Sept. 19, 2003), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is one of the most popular IRC Client available today for *nix systems.")
  10. ^ "BitchX wiki on GitHub: ANSI/UTF-8". Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  11. ^ Ryan Russell (2002). Hack Proofing Your Network. Syngress. p. 329.
  12. ^ "The Slackware Linux Project: Slackware Security Advisories". Slackware.com. 2009-04-26. Retrieved 2011-07-09.
  13. ^ "SourceForge.net Repository - [bitchx] Revision 5". sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
  14. ^ "SourceForge.net Repository - [bitchx] Revisions 6, 7". sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
  15. ^ "SourceForge.net Repository - [bitchx] Revisions 11, 12, 13". sourceforge.net. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
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