BitchX

Last updated • 1 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
BitchX
Developer(s) Colten Edwards (panasync) and Kevin Easton (caf)
Stable release
1.2.1  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 14 November 2014
Preview release BitchX-1.3 (January 1, 2013;10 years ago (2013-01-01)) [±]
Repository
Written in C
Operating system Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, OS X
Type IRC client
License BSD-3-Clause GNU General Public License
Website bitchx.sourceforge.net

BitchX /ˈbɪtʃɛks/ 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]

Contents

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

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HexChat</span> IRC client

HexChat is an Internet Relay Chat client that is a fork of XChat. It has a choice of a tabbed document interface or tree interface, support for multiple servers, and numerous configuration options. Both command-line and graphical versions are available.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irssi</span> Text-mode IRC client

Irssi is an IRC client program for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows. It was originally written by Timo Sirainen, and released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later in January 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Relay Chat</span> Protocol for real-time Internet chat and messaging

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blackbox</span> Free and open-source stacking window manager for the X Window System

Blackbox is a free and open-source stacking window manager for the X Window System.

Info-ZIP is a set of open-source software to handle ZIP archives. It has been in circulation since 1989. It consists of 4 separately-installable packages: the Zip and UnZip command-line utilities; and WiZ and MacZip, which are graphical user interfaces for archiving programs in Microsoft Windows and classic Mac OS, respectively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SmallBASIC</span> BASIC programming language dialect with interpreters released as free software

SmallBASIC is a BASIC programming language dialect with interpreters released as free software under the GNU General Public License version 3 for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Android.

A BNC is a piece of software that is used to relay traffic and connections in computer networks, much like a proxy. Using a BNC allows a user to hide the original source of the user's connection, providing privacy as well as the ability to route traffic through a specific location. A BNC can also be used to hide the true target to which a user connects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ERC (software)</span> IRC client for the Emacs text editor

ERC is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client integrated into GNU Emacs. It is written in Emacs Lisp.

IRCX is an extension to the Internet Relay Chat protocol, developed by Microsoft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe's Own Editor</span>

JOE or Joe's Own Editor is an ncurses-based text editor for Unix systems, available under the GPL. It is designed to be easy to use.

The following tables compare general and technical information between a number of notable IRC client programs which have been discussed in independent, reliable prior published sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ZNC</span> IRC bouncer

ZNC is an IRC network bouncer or BNC. It can detach the client from the actual IRC server, and also from selected channels. Multiple clients from different locations can connect to a single ZNC account simultaneously and therefore appear under the same nickname on IRC. It supports Transport Layer Security connections and IPv6.

The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of available applications supporting the eDonkey network.

ircII Oldest still active developed IRC-Client

ircII is a free, open-source Unix IRC and ICB client written in C. Initially released in the late 1980s, it is the oldest IRC client still maintained.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WeeChat</span> IRC client

WeeChat is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client that is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later and has been developed since 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Konversation</span> IRC client

Konversation is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client built on the KDE Platform and is free software released under the terms of the GNU GPL-2.0-or-later. Konversation is currently maintained in the KDE Extragear Network module, which means that it has its own release cycle which is independent from the main KDE applications. It is the default IRC client in many prominent Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, the KDE spin of Fedora, and Kubuntu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ayttm</span> Instant messaging client

Ayttm is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. It is the heir of the EveryBuddy project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">KVIrc</span> IRC Client

KVIrc is a graphical IRC client for Linux, Unix, Mac OS and Windows. The name is an acronym of K Visual IRC in which the K stands for a dependency to KDE, which became optional from version 2.0.0. The software is based on the Qt framework and its code is released under a modified GNU General Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LeafChat</span> IRC client

LeafChat is a free IRC client for Microsoft Windows and Unix-like operating systems, licensed under the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later. A donation is requested.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nanolinux</span> Lightweight Linux distribution

NanoLinux is an open source, free and very lightweight Linux distribution that requires only 14 MB of disk space including tiny versions of the most common desktop applications and several games. It is based on the Core version of the Tiny Core Linux distribution and uses Busybox, Nano-X instead of X.Org, FLTK 1.3.x as the default GUI toolkit, and SLWM. The included applications are mainly based on FLTK.

References

  1. 1 2 "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. 1 2 3 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. ISBN   9780080495873.
  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". GitHub . Retrieved 2016-05-13.
  11. ↑ Ryan Russell (2002). Hack Proofing Your Network. Syngress. p. 329. ISBN   9781597496087.
  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.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.