BitchX is a free

IRC IRC (Internet Relay Chat) 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 ...

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuable ...

("If you're already using Linux, then you have your choice of several (IRC) clients. BitchX is a popular one.") that has been regarded as the most popular

ircII ircII (pronounced ''i-r-c-two'' or ''irk-two'', and sometimes referred to as ''IRC client, second edition'') is a Free and open source software, free, open-source Unix Internet Relay Chat, IRC and Internet Citizen's Band, ICB client written in C ...

-based IRC client. The initial implementation, written by "Trench" and "HappyCrappy", was a

script Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...

for the IrcII chat client. 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+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary s ...

toolkit support has been dropped. It works on all

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating systems, and is distributed under a

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

. It was originally based on ircII-EPIC, and eventually it was merged into the EPIC IRC client. It supports

IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communication protocol, communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic ...

, multiple servers and SSL, and a subset of

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

(characters contained in

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit computing, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character (computing), character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character enc ...

) with an

unofficial patch An unofficial patch, sometimes alternatively called a community patch, is a patch for a piece of software, created by a third party such as a user community without the involvement of the original developer. Similar to an ordinary patch, it alle ...

. On several occasions, BitchX has been noted to be a popular IRC client for Unix-like systems.Review:BitchX (Amiga)
, IRCreviews.org, Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("BitchX is favoured by many more experienced IRC users")A Day in the Life of #Apache
, OSDir.com (March 25, 2005), Retrieved 2009-09-29 ("XChat, mIRC, and bitchx are several popular clients")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 ....")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.")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.") The latest official release is version 1.2. BitchX does not yet support Unicode.

Security

It was known that early versions of BitchX were vulnerable to a

denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

in that they could be caused to crash by passing specially-crafted strings as arguments to certain IRC commands. This was before

format string attack Uncontrolled format string is a type of code injection vulnerability discovered around 1989 that can be used in security exploits. Originally thought harmless, format string exploits can be used to crash a program or to execute harmful code. The ...

s became a well-known class of vulnerability. 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-2007-3360CVE-2007-4584
. On April 26, 2009,

Slackware Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System (SLS), Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distr ...

removed BitchX from its distribution, citing the numerous unresolved security issues. The aforementioned vulnerabilities were fixed in the sources for the 1.2 release.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bitchx Unix IRC clients Free IRC clients IRC clients Free software programmed in C

Security

See also

References

External links