This is what he says anyway, he’s been on alot, I’ve always recognized him, more recently he’s tried telling people how he’s this better, successful person, so much so that whilst arguing with someone when I was in bed, about 4am, he mentioned my nickname, obviously this was a stupid thing to do

[03:43'am] <toomuchswag> ur like that lethality dude
[03:43'am] <toomuchswag> hes a no lifer too

This was whilst referring to soemone’s IRC login time, everyone knows I use an IRC bouncer, but I cba going into what that is at this time.
The below is what drew my attention after seeing the nick highlight:

[03:46'am] <Zer0> The guy who got played by a fake..
[03:46'am] <Zer0> I remember you :*
[03:46'am] <toomuchswag> who?
[03:46'am] <Zer0> You.
[03:46'am] <Zer0> Lacey remember.
[03:46'am] <toomuchswag> hang on
[03:46'am] <toomuchswag> i played myself?
[03:47'am] <Zer0> No you got played by a girl
[03:47'am] <toomuchswag> lacey?
[03:47'am] <toomuchswag> I dont know a lacey
[03:48'am] <Zer0> Lol
[03:48'am] <Zer0> Playing denial
[03:48'am] <toomuchswag> playing denial?
[03:48'am] <toomuchswag> far from it
[03:48'am] <toomuchswag> I just dont know a lacey :/
[03:49'am] <Zer0> Ur not the guy in thinking of tbh.
[03:49'am] <toomuchswag> B|
[03:49'am] <toomuchswag> nope obviously not
[03:49'am] <toomuchswag> i know ur called adam because i know laura

toomuchswag IS the guy (Jamie) that zer0 thought he was, I knew that right away, so I set about poking.

=== Sensitive info below ===
The stuff below may or may not have happened, I hold no responsitbility for anything posted

Firstly, using my self-confessed epic memory I remembered the password he had used all that time back, I logged straight into the UKCB account of toomuchswag using that password, clearly it WAS the same person, Jamie. Using the settings page, I got the email, I then threw the same password at that, it worked, then this is where I found more than I expected.
The above took me about 2 mins from the time I read the conversation between him and zer0. At which point he suddenly appeared on UKCB, and was talking about fake people, naturally I chimed in about his knowledge on fakes then we got to the below:

 [04:19'pm] <LEthaLity> you haven’t changed that much jamie, still the same passwords
[04:20'pm] <toomuchswag> i dun care if man get my chat passwords
[04:21'pm] <toomuchswag> i changed my paypal accounts and wow accounts to another one
[04:21'pm] <toomuchswag> when you hacked them remember
[04:21'pm] <toomuchswag> B|
[04:22'pm] <toomuchswag> but yeah try hacking my new accounts B|
[04:22'pm] <toomuchswag> it’s a criminal offense these days
[04:22'pm] <LEthaLity> lol
[04:22'pm] <toomuchswag> oh i forgot
[04:23'pm] <toomuchswag> ul never get my paypal accounts or wow accounts anything of real significance
[04:23'pm] <toomuchswag> as my chat user is on a seperate user B|
[04:23'pm] <toomuchswag> email rather

I let him have his little moment knowing that I had already done this apparently impossible task, 6 mins later, the penny dropped:

[04:29'pm] <toomuchswag> [04:23'pm] <toomuchswag> ul never get my paypal accounts or wow accounts anything of real significance
[04:29'pm] <toomuchswag> aww lethality
[04:29'pm] <LEthaLity> :p
[04:29'pm] <toomuchswag> u think ur clever?
[04:29'pm] <toomuchswag> Clearly not
[04:29'pm] <toomuchswag> if ur clever
[04:29'pm] <toomuchswag> get my paypal account
[04:30'pm] <toomuchswag> he just signed into my chat profile sara
[04:31'pm] <toomuchswag> isnt my chat pass stones101?
[04:31'pm] <LEthaLity> yes
[04:31'pm] <LEthaLity> and the email one
[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> my email pass isnt stones101
[[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> u tool
[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> lol
[04:32'pm] <LEthaLity> it was for that one
[04:32'pm] <LEthaLity> other wise I wouldn’t be sat on it would I
[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> what email is this chat registered with?
[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> isnt it the imsocool one?
[04:32'pm] <LEthaLity> yes
[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> Lol
[04:32'pm] <toomuchswag> ul be lucky
[04:33'pm] <toomuchswag> my paypal went to a complete new email otherweek
[04:33'pm] <toomuchswag> so u are obviously bubbling lad
[04:33'pm] <LEthaLity> paypal doesn’t bother me
[04:33'pm] <LEthaLity> I’m not stupid enough to even attempt to look at it or use it

At this point I went out, whilst he raged about me:

[05:42'pm] <toofast4you> what a bellend
[05:42'pm] <toofast4you> trying to spend money via my paypal?
[05:42'pm] <toofast4you> well lethality its all changed
[05:42'pm] <toofast4you> and iv informed the police
[05:42'pm] <toofast4you> you prick
[07:24'pm] <toofast4you> all i can say is
[07:24'pm] <toofast4you> lethality
[07:24'pm] <toofast4you> if i find out where u live mate
[07:24'pm] <toofast4you> ur a deadman
[07:25'pm] * toofast4you was kicked by Bouncer (Threats are not tolerated on this site – you have been banned [Issued by lucky_charm] – Banned for 1 hour.)

I literally walked in a minute later, firstly, I didn’t touch paypal, banks, money are shit I never would mess with, for fairly obvious reasons, I do find it interesting though, because he made allegations about people using his paypal when it happened years ago.

Before I get into his strange behaviour, he vented some more in the #London room.

[05:43'pm] <toofast4you> Jamie here
[05:43'pm] <toofast4you> block toomuchswag
[05:43'pm] <toofast4you> Lethality just hacked my account
[05:43'pm] <toofast4you> and hacked my paypal
[05:44'pm] <toofast4you> luckily i changed my paypal in time
-
[06:52'pm] <toofast4you> Lethality
[06:52'pm] <toofast4you> otherwise il rip ur throat out and send ur fingers to mummy and daddy

I can only assume there was a line in between the last two that got blocked by a badwords filter, lol, again I repeat, I didn’t even look at a paypal email, let alone try accessing it.

[07:34'pm] <toofast4you> mods are useless
[07:34'pm] <LEthaLity> mods are great
[07:35'pm] <toofast4you> lee u think ur clever
[07:35'pm] <LEthaLity> I know I’m clever :S
[07:35'pm] <toofast4you> ur a deadman when i get hold of you
[07:35'pm] <toofast4you> mackemlady will have no choice
[07:35'pm] <toofast4you> but to give ur name
[07:36'pm] <LEthaLity> she wont give it to you lol
[07:36'pm] <toofast4you> the police
[07:37'pm] <toofast4you> dude u hacked my account
[07:37'pm] <toofast4you> when u hacked my account
[07:37'pm] <toofast4you> u got all my bank details
[07:37'pm] <toofast4you> i can no longer access my paypal account
[07:37'pm] <toofast4you> because of you
[07:37'pm] <toofast4you> i want my account back
[07:38'pm] <LEthaLity> you said I had your paypal account last time too
[07:38'pm] <LEthaLity> Liar
[07:38'pm] <toofast4you> i want my account back now
[07:38'pm] <LEthaLity> I’m putting you on ignore
[07:38'pm] * toofast4you was kicked by UKChatterbox (Threats are not tolerated on this site – you have been banned [Issued by lucky_charm] – Banned for 1 hour.)

So much anger for someone who was adamant it 1) wouldn’t happen 2) had moved and secured his paypal, this is the 3rd or 4th person to make threats this year LOL, this one’s probably rates on the same level as Mark Edwards. He’s a fucking little dweeb.

The Findings

This may be of interest to the old nightclub users:

So he has a facebook account for his so-called ex, registered to this (in his own words) new email account o.0

Then the account itself:

The Protection from Harassment Act 1997
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
The Malicious Communications Act 1998
The Communications Act 2003
Breach of the Peace (common law) all have been breached

At first I didn’t give much thought into how she could have researched that fast, given her general display of stupidity, I did however know already, the details of most of the acts and that as I hadn’t sent messages, hadn’t lied or made threats, and wasn’t in Scotland (Breach of the peace in her example is part of Common Law in Scotland), that none of them were even applicable in these circumstances, it was yesterday though when I was reading back on stuff that I came across the following link after Google’ing something, which explained it all -  http://www.respectme.org.uk/Cyberbullying-and-the-law.html. So basically she pulled up a load of irrelevant crap without doing any research

Shortly after, the child, Tommy, attacked my server with a few bots, I haven’t gone too much into the logs, although I will point out to him that it is logged, and his IP is listed in there. The webserver took about 600-800Mb of data over a short period, enough to take it out of action for a short period until I had firewalled most of them, the web server has since had some hardening added allowing it to detect and protect itself better in future, admittedly this is something that should’ve been done before.

The purpose of the attack was the funny part though, he’s got it into his head that Charley has a chance of getting her son back, this is someone who’s accused her dad of raping her in the past, self-harms, smokes weed (as well as fucking the dealer), and to put it bluntly, is one fucked up individual, who has no chance in hell of ever having custody. I know Charley though, as well as a few other friends, we all see what she’s done because she’s done it countless times before, worms her way into someones circle/family, then leeches and uses them for her own means. She’s using the so-called expert law skills of Claire to try and fight for custody, by making some outright illegal (libellous/slanderous) comments, suggesting her parents aren’t doing a good job of raising him. They’re good people who have put up with her shit for a long time, I’m sure they’re doing a great job, but Charley’s convinced this family otherwise, enough so that the stupid prat Tommy claimed he was going to attacked Facebook to stop me spreading the posts/pics on there:

[6:00:11 PM] Hell of the Devil: hit fb servers with 1 petabyte of bandwidth
[6:00:31 PM] Hell of the Devil: this could cause ehr to lose TJ
[6:00:42 PM] Hell of the Devil: i am not going to let that happen

Firstly, Facebooks servers would LOL at such attempt, the attack on my server was laughable, I just lacked significant hardening for the server to cope. So he gained nothing from trying to shut me up via my site, like what…. I’m unable to just post it elsewhere??, is he (you because he’s most likely reading this) just going to attack every text/picture sharing site in existance :S

To be honest I think he’s a bit retarded, he may have certain tech skills, but his most probably one of those introverted kids with nowhere near as much knowledge as he’d like to think, his family have already displayed shockingly low levels of intelligence, with their insults, threats and use of legal terms. Whilst I was on Facebook I saw this “like” on his:  Tommy liked Don’t take children away from innocent mothers. I keep typing responses to that then backtracking, I’ll just leave it as anyone who knows her history will see the irony.

Today I found out one of the other participants in the screenshots is gunning for me also, yay. Jonathan Dennis, aka _TiGeR_ had the following to say:

[13:40] <_TiGeR_> cant have ppl fucking with me and putting shit up about me
[13:42] <_TiGeR_> but it all all be sorted
[13:42] <_TiGeR_>

nb. love the use of the smug smiley. Jonathan, maybe you should stop putting yourself in the same situations with the same girls and allowing yourself to constantly get caught out you disgusting sleaze-ball. All I can say is, I look forward to it/me “being sorted”, please join the back of the small queue with other people also making empty threats. Prat.

That’s pretty much it for now, only one last thing, I don’t check the IP’s of people visiting here (except when I needed to protect the server from attack), IP’s aren’t personally identifiable, and every website you’ve ever visited has also had and logged your IP, I only say this as Charleys rather desperate attempt to stop someone I know reading the posts was to tell her the following:

Because Lee will be able to get into the computer
He will get alot of information. Passwords, bank details (if you use online banking) etc

IP’s don’t allow magical access to computers, and passwords and information sent to banks would be encrypted at a high-level. No one has to register to use my site so I’m not getting passwords that way, although even then they’d still be hashed and unreadable, I have no idea what’s made her even more stupid then normal to say the above, I would hazard a guess it’s some bullshit knowledge from the all-knowing Haddon clan, they either genuinely think that or are trying to scare her. Whatever it is, I would never even attempt it. Needless to say, her suggesting I do that is just as illegal as anything else that’s happened.

Latest Updates 

Last Facebook statuses:
16/4/12: Lottie Haddon We have teh police involved because of Lee etc.. So hopefully he’ll be bamnged up by the end of the night
Latest (18/4/12): So the cops came round, can’t do fuck all as there is no evidence he did it.. Erm.. If I remember rightly.. Didn’t he admit to it?!
LOL?! Not really sure what else to say to that, I spent 3 hours explaining to the Welsh inbreds exactly the above, all their raging was pointless.

Other bullshit:
18/04/12

 [11:45:17] <+TheWomanInBlack> Rather funny really seeing as come monday he’ll have the police at his door :’)
[11:45:52] <+TheWomanInBlack> Because as soon as we hear back from fb we need to give the nice copper who thinks I’m 17 a call

23/04/12 11pm: So we’re at the end of Monday, I’m not arrested (surprise), I do have one update though, to the unaware who may have wondered why she would seem to know the day they’d arrest me, clearly they wouldn’t have told her, but it occurred to me today, that it’s her son’s b’day, so it seems highly likely she just chose a date that stuck out, she has a very funny habit of grouping drama around “significant” days. Eg. She cheated on me with Tigs, 2 days after a FAKE miscarriage, she then had another FAKE miscarriage on (of all days) Mothering Sunday, also by coincidence, the very next day, she was due to see her BF at the time, Steve. Emphasis on the word fake because they simply were, no proof, no proof of hospital/doctors, and the fact she managed to have sex straight after :S Not only is she a whore, she’s a lying one who constantly invents stories for her cause, every time she’s cheated she’s managed to justify it to herself.
Also, she’s “apparently” under advice to stay away from me (on the internet, lol), so she pops up, makes people aware of it, creating her little bit of drama, then fucks off. Funnily though someone(s) within that home is keeping a pretty close eye on this site.

24/04/12
Apparently Mark is continuing to display his hatred, the funny part is I’m not sure what he hates more, me, what he considers injustice of me not being arrested, or the fact that no one really gives a shit and is frankly bored with him threatening legal action on anyone who talks about, facebook “likes”, or doesn’t condemn what happened, lol. This is the first of his outlets of e-rage http://pastebin.com/WMyaf17R, I’m sure there’ll be more.

27/04/12
3 days since the last update, but oh what drama. Firstly, Tommy was “locked up” after trying to stab Charley, probably something that normally, wouldn’t be laughed at, but for anyone who’s dealt with her crap in the past, they’ll realize it was only a matter of time before someone felt the need to take such action. He’s since been released, but now, Mark (the step-dad) is apparently being charged after telling police on the phone that he would bomb my house and cut my throat.
Yeah… I lol’d too, he seems to be under the impression that a courtcase, bringing this stuff into the public will help their cause, I’m not sure how he thinks the justice system works, but it’s not like that, and I don’t think anyone will give you the time of day after your lies anyway….
In a mass of rage, to try and justify why I should be removed from a particular IRC network, him and “the mum” are coming out with an array of inventive tales about what I’ve supposedly done, these include how I’ve “hacked her account”, gained access to military details and the location of military personnel. This isn’t true, and would quickly be proved  if the need arose, so I can only surmise these are desperate stories with the only intention, to get me banned…sadface.
Oh also, apparently Charley shagged Mark when she turned up at theirs before Tommy and his mum had gotten back from Scotland, whilst she’s probably in denial, I may point out to Claire that Charley sold herself for sex last year, and has previously, she’s also shagged older guys from the net before, so don’t think too hard about if it’s likely, it most probably did happen, not least because Mark comes across as a scumbag who would very likely see the opportunity of using a vulnerable woman, miles from home, seeking the approval of the next family she’s trying to leech off, too good to miss.

ps. I was just giving some thought to replacing names, masking details in the screenshots to cover my own back, but having checked, and to void “their” argument even more, nothing on my posts can be classed as defamatory or libelous as the screenshots are real, as are any facts concerning her I’ve posted. It’s their job to prove otherwise. This probably explains the lack of police action, and why they’ve resorted to telling people I’m accessing stuff I’m not, maybe I should sue for defamation of character?

Your move, bitches.

Pics need to be clicked, then click again, and again to zoom EDIT: Fixed my theme especially cos I’m a baus like that.
Edit: Changed title to better reflect the content after advice.
And another edit: If you’re looking for updates on the reaction, there’s a separate post @ http://lethality.me.uk/2012/04/the-fallout/

Charley/Lottie/Charlotte, the girl who fucks her drug dealer, yeah, use of weed will go down brilliantly with your solicitor and child custody case. For the UKCB users, Charley used the nickname LittleMinstrel.

Did she try pinning her drug dealer pregnancy, which turned out to be an appendicitis op on me? who knows. But an obvious question beckons, how does the alleged pregnancy and mothers-day miscarriage fit in, when she’s told the above guy she was on implant. She’s either lied about having implant, or faked ANOTHER pregnancy and miscarriage.

Then this rather strange convo, Jon Dennis is known as _TiGeR_ on UKCB.

This’ll do, for now. there’s plenty of convos that are just as funny and wrong, including one where she’s acting like an invalid dominatrix to some submissive (slave) in an attempt to get him to come around and clean her place :’)

So here goes, and for most, here’s a heap of stuff they never even knew I was working on :p

• Anope – Usual, bug-finding, fixing, need to finish some modules.
• lethalitys-inspircd – Need to move this from Gitorious to Github as it’s where InspIRCd’s main repo is now hosted, luckily I already have an account. lethalitys-inspircd is basically my fork of inspircd-2.0.5, adding some stuff and fixing others, including updating documentation, as inspircds, especially 2.1′s is extremely out of date. Sidenote- InspIRCd should scrap 2.1 and start again from 2.0, it’s actually not worth fixing/reverting all of the changes and fail.
• WatchTower – This is my phpBot, name needs to be finalized, it started as a version I was going to release, for people who wanted functionality similar to UKCB’s Gateway, only problem is the variety of websites and database systems that people use, as opposed to UKCB’s which is all custom-coded, make this an annoying task. (I’m not writing one version for Joomla, another for e107, another for phpNuke, etc etc), solution: lose some of the functions.
• IRC-Heaven - I WILL start this properly soon, it will be a source of everything IRC related, it’s a task I just don’t have time for at the moment as it needs a site which will include forums, wiki, integration with Anope Services, something that no current CMS will give me…yet.
• My Wiki – Structure finalized, just the main task of adding content, tutorials, etc now. Something which I can probably do before the end of this week as I can write how-to’s like nobody can -.-
  and finally…
• The Chat Site – I’m not releasing the name yet, for obvious reasons, anyone who’s known me on IRC for 2/3+ years will know I’ve had my own IRC network, AuroraChat, it started as a learning project, at one point I had 30-50 users on at a time whilst never really be content with the site and setup. I’ve since let the domain names expire and have started with something else…
  Some people may have known about my “UKCB-Extra” as it was leaked when they had their downtime, firstly, it was never a chatsite, it was just a site with some neat tricks that the real UKCB site should have (in my opinion), I never advertised it, but the fact so many people found it and thought it was some alternative to UKChatterbox says something…
  Without bashing UKCB, they’ve had more downtime this year (1st Jan, 1st Feb, 20-21st Mar), each time you see the same comments about it, you also see the same comments WHEN it is online, about what people think of how it’s run, the staff, and although I do still use it as many do, the question gets asked.. “Why?”.The reason why, and the reason they still get so many new users is that despite how many results you get when looking for chat in Google, few are moderated, targeted at UK users, or have the same variety of rooms that UKCB does (yes I know it could have more), it cannot be argued really, I’ve seen so many people break off, start their own sites or find and recommend other sites, and it always ends the same way; they end up back on UKCB.
  So…with that said, I’ve finally decided it’s my turn to create a “UK-targeted social network with moderated chatrooms”, with the following ideas and improvements on “similar services”:
  * Web-Tech/design: A clean, html(5) compliant website that works on all browsers, no bad code, no exploits (cough-ukcb), with a simple easy to navigate interface.
  * IRC-Features: Most of this is beyond the normal users/chatters level, but using InspIRCd allows for more commands, modes with it easier to make changes without restarting the whole network, also using the latest version of Anope. Ultimate Goal: Chat-service downtime will be absolute minimum if ever, once established.
  * Moderation: I could do a whole post on this alone, but *deep breath* UKCB was once a moderated chatroom, as far as they’re concerned they still are. But here’s the problem they have, a moderated chatroom has active moderators in nearly all public channels, who moderate content as it happens or very soon after, I don’t know when the last time you used UKCB is, but if it’s within the last ~2 years, and assuming you’re not one of the trolls, you’ve probably noticed that you never see them until someone’s done something or you’ve made a report (although lately even report responses have been slack). Point being, this isn’t active moderation, this is just an unmoderated service with a complaint/report procedure. So in short, and this has probably been said with every ukcb-wannabe site, but I will stick to it, these rooms will be moderated, I will go out of my way to get international users to cover the late/early hours, the rules wont be that much different from the old msn ones, and dare I say it, ukcb, it really shouldn’t be too much to expect a chat that doesn’t wish to condone inappropriate, abusive or rude content.
  * Web-IRC client: This is the area I’m still undecided on -.- I want to avoid UKCB’s Java reliance, which brings with it the security popups, so probably something flashed base, it’s clean, fast and everybody has flash nowadays. Their will also be a mIRC available, with tailored scripts for the network.

  Targeting trial and bug-stamping testing for May/June, with a launch in July mid-late July, I have thousands of lines of code to do -.-

That’s pretty much it, just done this post as someone asked why I’ve been quiet lately, lol. Peace.

EDIT/UPDATE:
The name for my php bot has been decided, it’s now phpAurora, as a tribute to the previous one on my old AuroraChat. I’m writing the network specific version for my upcoming site/network first, then I’ll strip it back a bit and add modules for various cms such as phpFusion, Joomla, e107 and possibly Drupal, with another version to just run on it’s own.
More information at …

Found at wiki.lethality.me.uk, it will host a wealth of information, mostly tutorials and stuff I’m constantly telling people, or helping with on a daily basis, most relating to IRC and coding.
I already have an idea of the kinda stuff that’s going on it, but would like some ideas to help prioritize, and also just comments about anything else you’d like.

Some of the upcoming tutorials include:

• Complete walk-throughs on setting up UnrealIRCd and InspIRCd with Anope Services.
• Individual, in-depth tutorials on the above IRCd’s (setting up, modules, troubleshooting).
• mIRC: setting up, configuring and adding scripts.
• Anope: Setting up latest 1.8 and 1.9 releases, upgrading, troubleshooting, and installing modules.
• Coding: Tips and help on programming/scripting, with an index of some I’ve done.
• Most likely some Adobe Photoshop/After Effects stuff now I have screen-capturing mastered.

..So… comment below (hoping it works), and send your ideas.

Bobby Amlani (30), (nick alias: Blaster) founded UKChatterbox whilst studying at the Anglia Ruskin University, along with his brother Parul, aka Paz. This year marks it’s 10th anniversary, during which time, the service has seen a lot of changes, users, staff members and problems. What follows is an in-depth history of UKChatterbox (UKCB) from it’s beginning as a small IRC network, upto the present day, the largest moderated UK based chatrooms provider with ~2 million registered users.

Firstly, UKChatterbox didn’t first appear on the net as “UKChatterbox”, it’s beginning dates back to 2001. A website called gasbubbles.com created by Bobby, provided chat targeted at university students. Profiles had more details then the current UKCB, with users allowed to post contact details for IM (AOL, MSN).

UKCB’s predecessor; Gasbubbles

 
Gasbubbles was a laid-back service, few rules and regulations. In time the website-side of it would fade as UKChatterbox grew, although for a large time UKCB’s chat rooms were on the same server as GasBubbles, eventually these would merge.
Mid-2002 saw the first appearance of UKChatterbox, this was accompanied by UKStudentChat and UKTeenChatrooms, all with their own sites, although seemingly all sharing the same database, little-known fact, ukstudentchat.co.uk will, to this day take you to ukchatterbox.

UKChatterbox was aimed at both users in the UK, and users from outside, who just wanted to talk to people in the UK. At this time the site still was somewhat of a free-for-all, rules-wise.

Profiles on UKCB at this time contained a mass of info, some of which you probably wouldn’t make public nowadays, this includes, real name, date of birth, star-sign, location, uni, hobbies, favourite food/tv/film, likes/dislikes, and like gasbubble’s profiles; instant messenger details. Some time after this, and before 2003, Jackal joined as part of the help team, he later went on to become administrator, then running the site as Network Administrator when Blaster and Paz took a step back from things.
At the start of 2003, the website went through an apparently temporary change as it’s user-base increased and a newer, cleaner looking website was desired. They also introduced their website’s messaging inbox system for registered users, encouraging users to register for more features.

UKChatterbox was still small, it’s worth noting at this time that MSN and Yahoo still had their own chatrooms open, it wouldn’t be until they closed that UKCB would see a significant rise in users.
During the first half of 2003, the website saw numerous improvements including the ability to search for users using postcodes, encouraging users to chat to people near them. A flirt room also existed, but this was quite short-lived as UKCB would soon start their clean-chat policy, this is apparent in a simple change in wording that appeared on the website, February 2003 displayed the title ”UK Chat – Adult Chat”, the following month this became “UK Chat – Clean Adult Chat”. This month also saw significant updates to their forum system, the ordering of posts, displaying the most recent, at the top, this is common in most forum software, but a change that UKCB have (for some unknown reason) reverted.

UKCB was gaining attention, some of this attention was unwanted. I can’t verify if it was the first (it’s possible that previous chat downtime was also the result of attacks) but UKCB attracted it’s first attack on the website in May 2003.
In July 2003 UKChatterbox introduced the “yellow site”, very similar to the one you see today, new features included a quiz system, improved forum, searchable profiles, a buddy list, and a regulars list (much forgotten and hidden, but still working at www.ukchatterbox.com/regulars.php). They also added more IRC servers to support more users, allowing UKCB to move away from its GasBubbles homed chatrooms, and for it to become a complete service in its own right. At this stage user numbers hovered around the 100-400 mark.

September was a big month, UKCB started attracting users, and revenue by advertising for TV programmes, such as Big Brother, The Salon and the Terry and Gaby show. They were also changing their policies, nickname rules were introduced, and cyber-sex and dirty talk was being stamped out, promoting a cleaner and safer place for younger users.
They needed to too, this was the same time alot of media attention focused on the negatives of the internet, and chatrooms, specifically for young users, this was also the same month that MSN announced they would be closing their chatrooms the next month, which would result in a mass of people looking for new places to chat. UKChatterbox was going to benefit from this. Paz, wrote an article on this effect for The Guardian.

Side-note: MSN closed their chatrooms as moderating them and protecting its younger users was becoming harder, cases of adults pretending to be teenagers to solicit (groom) young users, was on the rise, and the accountability was growing for any service that provided chatrooms for young users. Whilst they were pushing the MSN instant messenger as a method for people to stay in contact, this lacked the social feel and variety of a chat room. Users started to look for chat rooms elsewhere, often un-moderated, with little to no rules or regulations.

October 15th 2003: the day after Microsoft’s MSN chat rooms closed, UKCB launched their own safety initiative, vowing to improve chat safety, this came along with more changes on the UKCB website, in an effort to move into a more regulated and professionally run service.
Over the following year, more of the other major chat rooms closed, including AOL and Yahoo. UKCB’s users kept growing, at this time the average number of users online was 500-1000, with few users registering, but using the option to jump straight into chat.
In June 2005 UKCB reached 1000+ registered users, this resulted in an increase in staff members and rooms, whilst the number of rooms open to non-registered users lowered. The site also changed very slightly, to the same layout you see today, this design hasn’t changed since, although talk of a “new” site has been in the air since 2006/2007.

By late 2006 UKCB was at it’s peak, they had more regular chatters then ever (regular, is significant, as UKCB has +2 million users, but most of which are people with multiple accounts, and people who have registered and not returned). Staff numbers were also at a high, they had over 80 chat room moderators; added to other staff for profiles, forum and administration, totalling 100+ staff, over 3 times the number today.

The 2nd of December 2006 saw the first of UKCB’s major service losses, a database was lost meaning loads of users had to re-register, I don’t know the exact cause of this, I do know though that UKCB suffered an sql hack not too far from this time, it is possible this was the same time, UKCB are famed for covering up security exploits though, as more reading will reveal.

As other services grew users had more and more ways of interacting, outside of UKCB, the largest of these being Facebook, a combination of those services and UKCB’s lack of updating has led to an obvious fall in users. I won’t go into my thoughts of how I think the administration and moderating on UKCB has contributed to this, if not directly, then indirectly by users being put off by idiots who get away with murder.

2011: A bad year

2011 saw the result of UKCB’s old website, and over-stressed server baring the brunt of a number of attacks and exploits. The UKCB infrastructure and website was never meant for the number of users it has, it’s old functions have no business on a site with more then a few thousand users.
Beginning in July, the server suffered a denial of service attack, this was a relatively small attack, but seemingly impossible for them to defend against as their server was already running at near-full capacity (this is the response they gave). The end result was their server host denying all access to the IP of the  irc.ukchatterbox.com IRC/chat server, the authorization software that deals with users passwords on connect, is based on this server, meaning their other 2 servers, mars and venus are quite useless, eg. users are set to Guest nicknames.

During August/September, more attacks were launched, with the website becoming the target, and sql injections being found. Initial reports about such were practically laughed at and ignored by the administration, the response being to just “duck heads and hope it goes away”, this wasn’t the case.

An sql injection allowed users details to be viewed, this included registered emails and passwords, the result of which was staff accounts being compromised and malicious activity being carried out on the chatrooms, eg. banning other staff members
UKCB spent days in chaos, the Operations manager (Dragon) and Blaster, had no idea what was being accessed and how, their only response was to disable all admin logins, this eventually spread to staff logins and even the entire user database being disabled, with the chat service being closed, on more then one occasion, days at a time.

Side-note: An sql injection is a vulnerability especially common in old methods of mysql database access, basically information submitted to functions on the website isn’t sanitized or cleaned up, allowing a user to feed their own text and mysql commands to the server, this can allow a user to retrieve info, and even alter/delete entries.

Fluentcode, the last and only competent programmer and technical administrator of UKCB, who had previously quit, was bought back temporarily to fix some of the problems. Whilst some of the injections were cleared up, a newer issue was being exploited, social engineering, with access to staff members names, most of them appearing on Facebook, dilvulging personal information for the world to see, it was no longer necessary to “hack” into UKCB, it was a matter of gaining enough information on a user to guess details to their email accounts, eg. via a password reset page, specifically, security questions. Over 3 weeks after the initial database attack, staff accounts were still being accessed on the server, even Blasters accounts were compromised.
In-house staff communications mentioned choosing secure passwords and security details more then 3 times, they never listened, one administrators personal accounts were still being accessed into November. I only mention it because staff put alot of blame on the people working on the website itself, no matter how much the website was fixed and patched up, it was useless if their emails were insecure. Logging into UKCB as staff only stopped when the quite drastic step was taken to disabling staff members password resets.

In Closing

So there it is, nearly 10 years, 2 million registered users have registered, over 300 staff, later, UKCB is still going, not as strongly as it was, but still. We should expect a new website in the near future, with advances in web standards and browser technology, it’s way behind the times; further details to come when they announce it. See you around.

Sources for main article: The guardian. Old website info (http://web.archive.org)
Feel free to contact me about any inaccuracies.

Extra Info

*There has been a gradual decline, this has been in-line with the decline of average users online.

Software Used 

Website: Custom Coded
Server Software: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) - PHP/5.2.6-1
IRC web-client: Pjirc
IRC Server: Unreal-3.2.9 (custom modules)
IRC Services: Anope-1.8.2 (custom modules), – Denora Stats-v1.4.5.411
Gateway: A custom coded php bot (may need revision).

]]> http://lethality.me.uk/2012/02/ukcb-history/feed/ 0 http://lethality.me.uk/2011/12/anope-autovoice/ http://lethality.me.uk/2011/12/anope-autovoice/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:22:15 +0000 Lee http://lethality.me.uk/?p=440 This is a common request, and one that most people end up using 3rd party bots/scripts or Anope modules for, when its functionality is in the Anope core already.

This works on recent versions of Anope-1.8 and requires us altering ChanServ’s levels.
ChanServ’s levels can only be altered and implemented when XOP is turned off, meaning you’ll need to add new users access using numeric values eg. VOP=3, AOP=5, SOP=10.

1. So, first thing’s first, disable XOP if it’s enabled using /cs set #CHANNEL XOP OFF.
2. If you do /cs levels #CHANNEL list you can see the required access levels for various commands, the one we’re after is AUTOVOICE.
3. Do you want just registered users to get voiced, or all users? An unregistered user has level 0, a registered one has 1. For ALL users type /cs levels #CHANNEL set autovoice 0, and for REGISTERED users use /cs levels #CHANNEL set autovoice 1.

And that’s all there is to it, you may wish to use this for a degree of damage control in the event of flood-bots, eg. Setting the channel to +m and having ChanServ autovoice registered users. There are many possibilities, and the same idea can also be applied to the AUTOHALFOP, AUTOOP levels.

… Read the rest

Module designed and tested on the 1.9.5 release.

To enable the command add the following to nickserv.conf
module { name = “ns_massset” }
command { service = “NickServ”; name = “MASSSET”; command = “nickserv/massset”; permission = “nickserv/massset”; }

Download

Suggested GoogleMaps Route:

View Larger Map
Actual Route:

Lost in Bracknell

4 miles / 6.437376 km