Not all bots are evil

There appears to have been a malicious compilation of the EnergyMech IRC Bot that is currectly "in the wild".
The SANS ISC has reported this. Unfortunately the diary entry is not entirely clear and can be read that EnergyMech itself is a malicious bot. I have spoken with another handler about it and he will be speaking with the handler that wrote the entry regarding the wording.

News like this makes it even harder for legitimate users of IRC bots and even IRC in general to find hosts that allow these legitimate bots, clients and servers to operate on.

IRC is not evil
It is used by thousands a day for discussions just like Forums and IMs.

IRC bots are not evil
They provide channel control services where the network does not provide it, as well as other services. Some examples are RSS reading, Stock Quotes, Web Services, Weather information, Trivia game and Dictionaries.

IRC is not dead
On one of the neworks I am currently connected to there are 43,757 other users connected. That's more than some towns.

IM is realtime but cannot replace the ability to have a central gathering place for numerous people to discuss a shared interest.
Forums are central gathering places for people to discuss shared interests but are not real time.

I'm officially published in Beta

Some of you may know that I've been working on some documentation for integrating MS System Center Configuration Manager and MS Forefront Client Security so that they could play nice together. Well the document has been delivered to MS and posted as a Beta on Codeplex. Assuming it doesn't turn anybody's network/servers into smoking rubble, it should be posted on the main Microsoft site in the next couple weeks.

The Verdict is In!

Many of you probably already know that my absence from life in general over the last few months has to do with the fact that I was selected for a Jury in a large criminal case in Federal court.  After 8 and a half weeks of testimony and 3 days of deliberation we reached a verdict and were finally released to go back to our normal lives.

For info on the trial and the results see the following article from chron.com: Former El Paso Corp. traders are found guilty.