When you make an online credit card purchase or do online banking, your communication with the web server is, more than likely, protected using a technology called SSL. SSL is Secure Sockets Layer. It's a means of encrypting and authenticating a communication channel between two peers.

Traditionally, IRC has always been "clear text". Meaning all communication over an IRC connection can be "sniffed" by someone that has access to the network link between you and the IRC server. This includes your ISP, any network administrators that manage your company network, and any ISP in the path of you and Blabber.net. They all have the technical ability to see your conversations on Blabber.net, public and private. Note, this is not to say this is done by any of the parties mentioned above. In all cases I know of, this is never done. But that doesn't stop you from taking measures to ensure your conversations remain as intended - private.

Thanks to SSL this is easily made available. Blabber.net is one of the few IRC networks that support SSL, and probably the only IRC network in South Africa to have full support for it. The following sections explain how to get connected using SSL on Windows with Stunnel.

Until mIRC has builtin SSL support, Stunnel will remain an important component for establishing SSL connections to Blabber.net. The latest version (4.0) can be downloaded from here along with an installation script and custom configuration file for Blabber.net. Once downloaded, double click the ssl.exe file. A screen should appear asking you where you'd like to extract the files. It is recommended that you extract to your current mIRC folder, purely for convenience. Once you've chosen the destination folder, click install and all files will be setup.

Now all you need to do is run Stunnel-4.00.exe in the destination folder you chose above. If it loads successfully you should see it's icon in the tray in the bottom right of your screen. If not, it will present an error message to you. Please report problems in #IRChelp.

If you're connecting from outside South Africa, you'll need to edit the stunnel.conf file in notepad. Load notepad and open the configuration file. You should see a line that says "connect=". You need to modify it to read the following:


Then save your changes and all should work.

If you are using the stunnel.conf file from this site, all you need to do now is type the following in the mIRC status window:


If you connect successfully, perform a /whois on yourself. You should see something like this:


You are now connected to Blabber.net securely :-).