IRC

To ascertain the authenticity of who you claim to be, a lot of IRC servers try to contact your machine and ask it who you are. The Ident Protocol is used to handle this request, but Windows machines do not run an Ident server. Most Windows IR...

Because the IRC protocol is text based, you can easily look at it and see what's going on. You can do this either by creating a raw Telnet connection to an IRC server and typing the commands manually or by running a packet sniffer that displa...

In practice, this means that the maximum length of any message will be approximately 460 bytes, as there will also be bytes used at the start of the line to say who the sender is and to whom the message is being sent. If your nickname is...

A process called identd runs in the background and accepts queries from remote machines. The Ident server then responds with information that identifies the user of that connection. Most IRC servers attempt to use the Identification Protoc...

When you are writing a bot that needs to parse the input from other users, it is all too easy to write code that can break when users apply formatting to their messages. In some cases, this formatting is automatically added by a user's IRC c...

Whether you are trying to parse messages on the fly or store them in a different format, you will notice that people who use colored messages throw a monkey wrench in the works. Adding color to messages means adding lots of spurious control c...

When you send private messages to another IRC user, those messages are vulnerable to snooping. The messages are being sent as plain text and can therefore be sniffed while they travel from your client to the IRC server and finally to the reci...

In the case of IRC, they're seen on a regular basis. All it requires is a route flap out of MCI in New York, a fiber-optic cable cut from SBC in Chicago, or an ATT core router crash in London, and you've got problems getting packets from one ...

CTCP is the Client-to-Client Protocol, which is used over IRC to send structured data. In general, a CTCP request will be sent as part of a PRIVMSG message [Hack #78] to a user or to a channel. This message consists of a string of text betw...