IRC and Privacy

IRC is fundamentally a privacy problem when it comes to data protection: on one hand, an IRC user reveals quite a bit of data through their client and client connection — not necessarily more than with a web browser, but still enough to identify them. On the other hand, IRC is precisely the kind of place where people voluntarily say a lot about themselves — or at least claim to. So it makes sense that people want to appear anonymously on IRC — perhaps not in technical support channels, but there are other channels too.

So it seems natural to simply access the IRC network of your choice via Tor and thus achieve technical anonymization.

However, this presents some specific problems with IRCNet in Germany: on one hand, connections are not accepted from all external computers, and on the other hand, identd user resolution is required. Both of these, of course, create problems with anonymizing networks: I cannot ensure that I access a network through these methods and always come from a German node — the whole point of anonymization is precisely to distribute access across the entire world.

Additionally, an identd query creates a problem: it would have to be handled on the Tor server from which the connection goes out. This can certainly be done — there are identd servers that simply return default values for queries. But nonetheless, it's certainly a strange situation: in order to access IRC I have to allow access to my computer. By the way, this already creates a problem with firewalls if they don't properly provision identd responses.

The reason is of course clear: the network administrators want to ensure they have at least minimal control over what connects to their servers. An understandable requirement. On the other hand, this makes it difficult to operate, for example, help forums on the German IRCNet — I know from my own experience with a channel that it's absolutely not trivial for many users to configure their client accordingly. And anonymizing networks are completely left out.

I have no idea what the solution is here — except to move a help forum to a network that doesn't have these problems.

By the way, OS X users have another problem: IRC clients with SOCKS support (necessary for Tor) are few and far between. socat can help here — with it you can create a connection to a service via a SOCKS proxy without the client software having to support it. However, installing and using socat is not necessarily beginner-friendly. It's a shame that Apple hasn't implemented an appropriate mechanism in the operating system itself that would automatically use a SOCKS proxy — regardless of whether the client software supports it or not.