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ChatSpike is the IRC network that is home to InspIRC and you might have heard about it and that it has many issues.
I mainly focus on two issues that have bigger impact than some minor issues like ancient services having small issue of letting anyone to login as anyone without passwords or anything which still isn’t fixed (only workarounded), CertFP they managed to add long time ago.
First between 2015-04-17 and 2015-04-18 ChatSpike upgraded their IRCd which is a good thing, but they also updated their invalid SSL certificate that was also expired without telling anyone.
Or actually they did tell about it, the upgrade was mentioned hour before the servers restarted, but the SSL certificate change was only mentioned in global notice after the upgrade and on website (without RSS feed).
What does this mean? Simply that all users using TLS and who actually verified that they got the correct certificate (which was invalid and expired) got disconnected and as their clients tried to connect, they only encountered invalid certificate and thouht that something is wrong and attempted reconnecting. This again hit flood protections adding network wide ban of 24 hours.
Isn’t everyone using TLS? They should, but there are always stupid clients that don’t care about certificate validity at all and there are also some users who just blindly accept all certificates offered…
On the weekend 2015-05-09 and 2015-05-10 there was another SSL related issue. SSL was disabled entirely making all ports plain text affecting all users who use SSL regardless of whether they accept all certificates or not.
This issue was there around 20 hours until the ChatSpike operators managed to reload the SSL module. Can you guess what happens next? Many SSL users are banned for reconnecting too fast as “one does not simply SSL to plain text port”. So those users are banned for 24 hours unless the operators decide to clear that ban list.
I have no idea what they are doing as I was banned from the main (support) channel for being “destructive instead of constructive”.