It was actually almost 3 decades ago, making me feel extremely old - the period right at the end of '96 and into mid '97 when this was a popular way to cause mischief via IRC was truly a magical time
Hard to believe that during those times in IRC, you were used to automatically (and proudly) advertising your IP address, your exact client version, and the means for a direct connection to your client without any server in between (CTCP, literally “client-to-client protocol”). And all of that most often with no packet filter whatsoever, not even NAT, in between.
Everything was plaintext, including “authentication”, which was (at best) just asking the “ident server” on the same machine as your client who you claimed to be, which was considered sufficient because, after all, to run identd on its “privileged” low port meant you were an “administrator” (i.e. root of a unix machine).
CTCP messages still go through the server. DCC (direct client connection) are the p2p connections you are thinking of, but they of course don’t work behind nat.
I was behind NAT when I first got on IRC in ‘98. I set it up with ipfwadm.
Ah you are right, I mixed CTCP and DCC up. The former was also used to set up the latter I think? (Among other things.)
I joined IRC in the early 90s, there was no NAT then, packet filtering was uncommon, and practically nothing on the Internet was encrypted. It was a very different time.
