[LEGITimacy™]

[*] Internet Relay Chat - is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.

[*] Why Make a TUT on this? Well simply because this is a nice way of communication and plenty of times I am asked for help and when I tell the person to join my IRC they have no idea how to and wont take the time to look up how to and we are stuck using the PM system which isnt as fast and kills time. Its quite easy to setup and join, and once you learn how it becomes a must use again and again. About 80 to 90% of hackers I know use IRC.

[*] REQUIREMENTS:

[1] IRC CLIENT - There are many IRC clients out there. I will point you to some of the best for both windows and Linux OS.

[*] WINDOWS IRC CLIENTS:
[+] XCHAT
[+] MIRC

[-] XCHAT for windows is only a 30 day trial. So I would go with Mirc if your on a windows OS. But for Linux Xchat has no trial and its free :3

[*] LINUX
[+] XCHAT
[+] Konversation

[-] These can be downloaded and installed using the ubuntu software center.

[2] TOR

[+] TOR DOWNLOAD
[+] INSTALLATION GUIDE

[-] Make sure you have the tor GUI vidalia. Should be in the browser bundle package but if not windows users can go download it and Linux users can just go to package manager or ubuntu software center and install it.

[*] Lets get started! So once you have downloaded and got everything setup and ready lets start tor.

[+] Just Open up Vidalia and press the start tor button until your connected to the network. Make sure you have vidalia set to tors current path in the settings. The TOR Installation guide should tell you how to do this.

Spoiler:

[*] Next we want to open up our IRC client and setup our network to run through tor. In this example I will be using xchat running on a linux OS. But its the samething as running on a windows OS so dont panic :non:

[+] Open Xchat, should pop up the network list box. Find a random network and connect to it until you get your client box to appear. Then go to Settings>Preferences>Network Setup. There you will see the Proxy server options. We want to make those options look like this.

Spoiler:

[*] Okay now we should have our client running through TOR. Lets edit our irc server and details so we can connect to our preferred server and channel :yeye:

[+] Close your previous xchat you had running before and reopen it again. This time when the network list pops up, at the top you will see some options saying Nick Name, Real Name, etc.. Set those to the name you prefer. PROTIP: Dont be stupid enough to really put your real name on there -.- Next we want to edit one of networks. For this example we will be editing the ChatJunkies network so scroll down the list until you find it. Click on it and press the edit button to the right. You should see this.

Spoiler:

[+] Okay so this is the last part. We want to edit our favorite channels and add the channel that we want our client to automatically connect to when we connect to the IRC server. So lets make our favorite channel this -> #HF and press OK.

Spoiler:

[*] And we are finished, all we have to do now is go back to our network list and press connect. But when connect make sure your client first connects to TOR before it connects to the server. Like so.

Spoiler:

[*] Now you really dont need TOR, there are many other ways to keeping your anonymity such as an IRC bouncer, proxy, and VPN. But I will not be discussing this.


Hope you guys enjoyed this.

[The Real Slim Shady]

HexChat ( http://www.hexchat.org/ ) was branched from xchat and is under actual development. I would recommend this over xchat for both Windows and *nix

[LEGITimacy™]

Yea its still under development though which could mean it has quite a few bugs in it. I use konversation, its stable for all linux distros and with the Gnome interference it looks pretty good, and besides the Xchat linux version is buggy as hell and hasnt had as much work put into it as the windows version.

[The Real Slim Shady]

Yea its still under development though which could mean it has quite a few bugs in it. I use konversation, its stable for all linux distros and with the Gnome interference it looks pretty good, and besides the Xchat linux version is buggy as hell and hasnt had as much work put into it as the windows version.

Under development is why i like it. Who knows what security issues have arisen since the last xchat release 2-3 years ago. Im only a casual user now but so far I havent noticed any bugs. it should essentially just be xchat+whatever changes theyve made. It shouldnt be that buggy as the base project (xchat) has been around for years and years. And ive never had a real issue with the xchat linux version and ive been using it for years and years lol

Oh and I strongly dislike KDE and Gnome, which is why its unlikely ill ever use konversation. not sure about now but back in the day an app like that would have KDE dependencies. for now im thoroughly satisfied with HexChat for all my IRC needs. Oh and finally... mIRC? never. lol

[TheSkillfularrow]

chatzilla for firefox is superb client!