Forums General Discussion I'm kind of glad that exploit was found...

... This means that Khaled will more than likely release a quick bugfix version and I love new versions of mIRC. Whee.

Lets hope that a new fixed mirc will come out soon,
as an admin of a large dutch ircnetwork, I have allote of work gline-ing all those people who are abusing this 'exploit'.

Well, I'm more hoping he'll release a patch rather than a new version of mIRC - but who knows, perhaps he feels the need for more bug fixes than just this exploit *shrugs*

I just hope it's soon...

Regards,

I hope he doesn't wait too much longer. From the looks of the exploit, it looks as though it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to fix, and the thing is, the longer he takes, the more people that have their mIRC crashed. I think the number of "my mIRC crashed" posts that have shown up reflects this fact...

The new mIRC 6.12 that just released addresses a few more thingies, but the DCC vulnerability was the main reason to release this quick after 6.11.

We never release patches because we fear unexperienced IRC users will not understand how to use them. Most small thingies can wait till a next version, and might not even be worth a patch, with more important issues we want to take the easy road for the masses

Umm, to install a patch don't you simply run the-patch.exe and then when it asks "what is the path to mirc.exe" (which it can probably read from the registry anyway) you type it and click "ok"? That, to me, seems easier than the mIRC installer which requires selecting checkboxes, clicking next buttons, accepting licenses, etc.

I thought that might be the case, but I was still clinging to hope :P - a patch was released once before, way before I had even heard of IRC:

13/09/95 - released mIRC v3.64 patch

Or at least I assume it's a patch. But yes, I guess that was back when not 1,000,000 users used mIRC so it was more feasible to release something like that.

Thanks to "you lot" for fixing it though

Regards,

Thank You! 6.12 downloaded and installed! I (unlike several others) have no problem at all managing the upgrade install (or even the upgrade itself), and don't care how I get it be it patch or upgrade.

Releasing it as a full version makes sense when you have a lot of less-than-experienced users, as mIRC does, for a few simple reasons:
- Installation is recognisable to those who've used mIRC before - everyone who's installed mIRC once will know what to expect.
- New users can't accidentally download the patch thinking it's a new release. You just know this would become a top 10 repeated question on the board otherwise.
- Keeps versions simpler. There are already enough posts from people getting 6.1 and 6.01 confused, imagine if you add a patch release decimal on top of that or don't even change the version at all (as the 3.64 patch appeared to).

It's not like the mIRC installation is difficult anyway, besides a couple of shortcut creation checkboxes it's practically the same as a patch installation. And the size difference would be minimal aswell, even for me as a 56k user.

"But yes, I guess that was back when not 1,000,000 users used mIRC so it was more feasible to release something like that"

Regards,