regardless of any possible Linux console bug, any IRC client that sends
escape sequences straight to the screen is beyond buggy and majorly
insecure. IRC messages are untrusted data, so special characters must
be escaped; a simple and perfectly legal sequence like ESC#8ESC(0 is
enough to mess up your display (anyone remember the old talkd exploit,
'flash'?).
I know that ircII and sirc properly escape untrusted data, so I guess
something went wrong between ircII-EPIC and BitchX.
in any case, it's quite normal for escape sequences to be able to change
keyboard modes and things like that. I'm surprised that you mention
xterms though; if you were runnign BitchX under an xterm, then the linux
kernel isn't directly involved anywhere in the escape sequence decoding
(done by xterm) or the display updating (done by xterm, Xlib and the X
server).
did console-changing work at that point? and if not, how did you
kill your X server? Or did you do alt-ctrl-backspace, and did that
work?
Roger
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