We are asking people to upgrade to 6.03.
And we intend not to let connections with 5.x after a certain date - we are giving every one sufficient time to update.
The 5x exploit is only too easy to implement, and taking into account people's tendency to click on URLs it doesn't take a genuious to say click on this URL to see my picture or something similar and do it under <a href="irc://this.irc.org/joedoe.jpg" target="_blank">irc://this.irc.org/joedoe.jpg</a> Most of chatters are not aware of this, so we are just letting them know.
Also it seems that most Trojans out there, which are based on mIRC user 5.7 or earlier.
I agree the $asctime is much harder to get invoked by "accident"
