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UKChatterbox, a history

February 19th, 2012 | Posted by Lee in geeky-stuff - (0 Comments)
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A number of people have discussed the beginnings of UKCB, most versions lack facts, so here’s mine, using various sources and my own knowledge.

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 … Read the rest

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UKCB: Success

September 25th, 2011 | Posted by Lee in Shenanigans - (2 Comments)
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It may have taken some drastic measures, but UKChatterbox have now made an announcement on the website and are enforcing password changes, as well as offering password/security advice that is very similar to what I gave previously in http://lethality.me.uk/2011/09/online-security/

The announcement which can be found at http://www.ukchatterbox.co.uk/article/170 reads as follows:

The UKChatterbox website has recently been the target of several attacks intended to disrupt services, and as part of an ongoing security update, all UKChatterbox users are being asked to change their passwords as a precautionary measure.

Some general tips for passwords and security:

- If you have the password to other sites and services set the same as your UKChatterbox password (or have done in the past), we would recommend changing those passwords too. It is never really a good idea to use the same password for multiple sites. In particular, passwords to your e-mail and bank accounts should always be unique and not used elsewhere.

- Choose a password that is sufficiently complex. Make sure that it is at the very least 8 characters long, a mixture of letters and numbers and preferably mix in some capital letters too.

- Check your security questions for your e-mail and other sites. If a site you are signed up to operates a security question system to retrieve lost passwords, make sure that the answer to the question is not something anyone could answer but you. There have been a lot of issues recently with peoples’ e-mail accounts being accessed because

… Read the rest

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UKCB’s arrogance, a post that shouldn’t be necessary.

September 21st, 2011 | Posted by Lee in Shenanigans - (2 Comments)
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As the title says, this is a post that shouldn’t be needed.
The subject: UKChatterbox’s outages, this isn’t just the outage within the last 2 weeks, this goes back to July 1st.
The post on the UKChatterbox “Service Status Page”:

There was a disruption to both the web and chat services from 18:00hrs Friday 1st July 2011 to 21:00hrs Sunday 3rd July 2011 due to a machine failure. This has now been resolved.

What happened was, (and this will no doubt be denied by them) was that the website was attacked using a popular form of exploit (SQL Injection aka sqli), this is when a user inserts extra characters and commands for example, when using a login form, to carry out tasks such as logging a user in as an admin, returning information that shouldn’t be available publicly. UKChatterbox has had problems with sql injections in the past, and apparently never bothered to fix them properly or learn anything, the website (whilst most users are blindly happy with it’s presentation) is full of old, out-dated code. Updating the code to use newer methods of accessing databases can stop this. Incidentally the recent bold red maintenance message on the homepage was fluentcode fixing these issues now they’ve been made fully aware of them.

Anyway, back to UKChatterbox’s delayed downtime notices. Their next step was a server migration:

July 6th 2011: A major migration of the UKChatterbox website has been performed in order to remedy earlier problems. Access to the website may

… Read the rest

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Setting up mIRC for use on UKChatterbox [Basic]

August 25th, 2011 | Posted by Lee in irc | mIRC - (0 Comments)
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This is a basic run-through of the mIRC installation process and setting it up to connect to UKChatterbox.

  1. Downloading mIRC: Click the following link which contains the download for the latest version of mIRC from it’s website: http://www.mirc.com/get.php. Once it’s downloaded run the mIRC set-up program, currently this is titled mirc719.exe, you should get something like the following picture, click”Run”. 
  2. Once the mIRC Setup Wizard starts, click Next, Agree to the license,  Select a folder, I recommend changing it’s default, clicking “Browse” and select Desktop, this is easier for you to get to if you intend on adding scripts to it, then click Next. On the Choose components page, leave it as Full, with ALL of the check boxes ticked. Click Next and make sure ALL of the boxes are ticked, this will probably mean just ticking the bottom one for “Run as portable application”. The portable application option allows the configuration file and scripts to go into our Desktop/mIRC folder, if we hadn’t ticked it, scripts would go into a “hidden” file in c:/Users/USERNAME/AppData/Roaming/mIRC, which is a nuisance for the average user to get to. Now we’re ready to setup mIRC.
  3. Click the Run mIRC box and Finish. When mIRC opens you’ll be presented with an About page, and Register/Continue buttons. Click Continue this time, and every time you run mIRC. mIRC is freeware and doesn’t require registration. You should now have the mIRC Options dialogue.
    For Nickname enter your UKCB username: eg LEthaLity.
    Alternative is unlikely to

    4. … Read the rest

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