Software:BitchX

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Short description: Free IRC client
BitchX
BitchX logo - ACiD.png
Developer(s)Colten Edwards (panasync) and Kevin Easton (caf)
Stable release1.2.1 (November 14, 2014; 10 years ago (2014-11-14)) [±]
Written inC
Operating systemUnix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X
TypeIRC client
LicenseBSD-3-Clause GNU General Public License
Websitebitchx.sourceforge.net

BitchX /ˈbɪɛks/ is a free IRC client[1] that has been regarded as 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 was 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]

On several occasions, BitchX has 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. 1.0 1.1 "Opinion: Get online for (free) Linux support!". CNN. June 17, 1999. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/16/linux.idg/index.html.  ("If you're already using Linux, then you have your choice of several (IRC) clients. BitchX is a popular one.")
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 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. https://archive.org/details/bookofirc00char/page/44. 
  3. Peter Loshin (2004). IPv6: Theory, Protocol, and Practice. Morgan Kaufmann. p. 316. ISBN 9780080495873. https://books.google.com/books?id=_6dlixBQyP4C&dq=BitchX&pg=PA316. 
  4. "bitchx: Detail: 3204631 - Add UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 conversion in output text". SourceForge.net. 2011-03-09. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3204631&group_id=217909&atid=1041465. 
  5. Review:BitchX (Amiga) , IRCreviews.org, Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is favoured by many more experienced IRC users")
  6. A Day in the Life of #Apache , 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". https://github.com/BitchX/BitchX1.2/wiki#ansiutf8. 
  11. Ryan Russell (2002). Hack Proofing Your Network. Syngress. p. 329. ISBN 9781597496087. https://books.google.com/books?id=v8bp4mvpYc4C&dq=BitchX&pg=RA2-PA329. 
  12. "The Slackware Linux Project: Slackware Security Advisories". Slackware.com. 2009-04-26. http://www.slackware.com/security/viewer.php?l=slackware-security&y=2009&m=slackware-security.285737. 
  13. "SourceForge.net Repository - [bitchx] Revision 5". sourceforge.net. https://sourceforge.net/p/bitchx/git/ci/a9267d071695f7baebc7ac0ede15806400314320/. 
  14. "SourceForge.net Repository - [bitchx] Revisions 6, 7". sourceforge.net. https://sourceforge.net/p/bitchx/git/ci/9beb1dcd55e9d4272622dd75bb8b7a4e0a147f8c. 
  15. "SourceForge.net Repository - [bitchx] Revisions 11, 12, 13". sourceforge.net. https://sourceforge.net/p/bitchx/git/ci/ee2fe058c20493749c99f641940ae5d3cbcdd8be. 

External links