Re:Hrm, M$ might have something to do with it... (Score 1)

It's "perverted" because it's not completely RFC 1419. It's also IRCX - a set of extensions to the IRC protocol proposed by Microsoft. Never made it to RFC status.

IRCX is a cause of some holes, including a particularly interesting bug where you could talk to a user in a channel, without the message being seen by the rest of the channel (and without using /msg). I believe it's also the source of the "hexnick" attacks, where one will come on with someone else's nick as a hexadecimal number (plus something extra, I'm not sure what, though), and all messages sent by the person will show up with the other user's nick... I'm not sure that hexnicking is an IRCX "feature", however. Kind-of interesting though.