IRC Server as Tor Hidden Service on OpenBSD | Hacker News Reader

IRC Server as Tor Hidden Service on OpenBSD

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93 pointsecliptik53 comments

Man I wished we can go back to IRC, compared to the shitshow that is discord ! Slow client, stupid login circle-jerks, desktop-clients-vs-webclient and and and.

Yea yea I'm old, but dammit in "my day", it was easier to communicate and the "tech" didn't get in your way.

IRC was basically a "done product" and new features were usually spearheaded via "scripts" from users with a need.

It seems the "new features" in discord are product-managers trying to justify their job and keep adding feature-upon-feature and making it more of a xmass-tree-met-a-coder-on-crack situation !

I wished there was a product manager (I'm looking at you Spotify, netflix etc) that said, ok these next few quarters we are going to reward ourselves for 'REMOVING Features'.

We need the area of "Bring your own client" to really take off.

Ok i'm done venting (one should not comment before coffee on HN) :P

I miss IRC too, but I don't miss the doxxing and DDoS nonsense. I don't have to setup a znc bouncer to connect to Discord. I don't have to take any precautions. It just works. I hate the client though, so I feel you on that. The lack of terminal integration with Discord is painful.

That is mostly solved with ChanServ and NickServ services. Channels can't be taken over with DDoSes because ChanServ protects them and attackers can't get your real IP because NickServ provides host masking.

It's such a shame IRCnet refused to adopt services.

Wasn't that already a thing in 2001?

I was on euIRC and basically "grew up" with those services.

Yes, they were a thing even in the 90's.

People can still get your ip and ddos you on discord. its just a little expensive. theres a forum where you can pay $500 for someone to send an EDR to Discord from a police email. Also there was a file attatchment bug in the wild that leaked your ip as recently as 6 months ago which im not sure was even fixed. A guy I befriended in a hacking community proved it to me.

$500 seems cheap to hire someone to impersonate a police officer. Isn't that go to jail for a long time territory?

Its a highly illegal felony, yes. but take into account the value of a human life is low as $226 in some countries. These operators are in foreign countries and dont care.

Who said they were impersonating? Police officers don't mind working on the side for a little scratch.

What's holding you back? Name a network and a channel and booya. Just wait for the folks to join, i guess?

IRC isn't dead or anything like that [1]. I use it every day. I prefer it over alternative instant messaging services, i.e. discord, slack, teams etc. It has no clutter. It is simple.

[1]: https://libera.chat/

Man, I wish you would come back to IRC.

Who else started using it in 1996, and never stopped? Lots! Who else never touched any of the social media sites. Lots!

Discord is a frustrating UI experience for me on all levels, so I just can't bring myself to even open the software.

IRC was and is awesome.

Caveat: use it for casual socializing. If you need tools for risky things like political activism, business, security, etc - don't use IRC, for many reasons.

any good servers/networks you could recommend?

Libera chat is rad, though channels are a mixed bag on IRC servers. I've met awesome people with whom I've been in IRC channels now for... phew... 25 years, on Undernet of all places.

I find it hasn't changed all that much over the years, if at all, so some should be warned - it does remind me of the early wild-west days, which I love.

> I've been in IRC channels now for... phew... 25 years, on Undernet of all places.

List all the channels you're in.

No, thank you. But there are many awesome ones. And many that have been active since I joined... in 1996. When I left high school, I made friends on IRC. Many are my closest friends to this day.

I still use IRC, and I think that it is better than the other ones. I also use NNTP (I also have my own NNTP server for discussions about my own projects, but hardly anyone uses them so far).

> I wished there was a product manager (I'm looking at you Spotify, netflix etc) that said, ok these next few quarters we are going to reward ourselves for 'REMOVING Features'.

What is needed is to avoid adding bad features and avoid removing good features.

> We need the area of "Bring your own client" to really take off.

Yes, I agree. Allow that you can bring your own client, with your own features.

Make a protocol and file formats that is simple (but not too simple) and capable of better end user controlling, and then make the implementations, too.

(Also, some features can be made optional if that would help, too.)

>What is needed is to avoid adding bad features and avoid removing good features.

True, but reading change logs (I really like reading them), i very very seldom see "Removed feature xyz" but I do see "added abc X 10..n". I'm pretty sure no-one gets promoted by removing features in the current work-job-boss-promotion-setup.

There are I think two useful features things like Slack and Discord have brought to the table.

1. Pinned messages. Yes, to an extent Channel topics can serve this way, but the limited space in IRC leads to "Use !jabberbot help for a list of commands, and !jabberbot faq so we don't ban you for asking the same thing for the 40th time." Slack and Discord suffer from people who don't read pinned messages but it can at least help deflect repeat stuff.

2. Threading. In some contexts, it makes sense to take a follow-up loosely "private" in the sense of not messaging to everyone else in the channel.

Other than these IRC is superior in basically every other way.

I looked at the Clone Hero discord server recently and despite it using pinned messages and having a lot of info in Getting Started + FAQ channels, that info still gave many !commands for paragraphs of text and various images that were only available from the bot. I couldn't understand why.

Not a bad guide.

However, never, EVER change your root login shell in OpenBSD. You've just opened a can of worms. Set up doas for that, and keep using zsh as your regular user if you want. Simple /etc/doas.conf:

      permit :wheel

Use nvi from packages (it's nvi2 actually, base vi it's nvi) instead of nvim, much faster. It's basically base vi with UTF-8 support. Run :exusage and :viusage from within nvi. Also, my ~/.exrc:

    set showmode ru ts=2 
    set sw=2

set iclower

What’s bad about the root shell?

If you change it and for whatever reason it doesn’t work, you will be unable to login as root and the only way to fix it is to reboot into single user mode on a local console. Not exactly the best of things if your machine is not in the same room with you.

In addition to what eurasiantiger said, it's been a best practice for decades to keep the root environment default and untouched.

At a behavioral level, you don't want to make root's environment so comfortable that you use it more than you should. By keeping it vanilla /bin/sh you encourage admins to log off and do their usual work in their usual environment.

At a technical level, as soon as you start customizing the root env you open a lot of doors for dynamically linked dependencies to whatever shell+goodies you switch to, which expose root to potential vulnerabilities.

You also increase the risk that updates will break root in some obscure way, which will not have been tested by the OS Q/A process.

There's one important step missing from the guide, for newcomers to OpenBSD anyway:

man afterboot

Thanks for the guide!

I've always felt setting up the server is the easy part. The more complicated bit is setting up the clients, especially for friends who aren't as tech savvy, or just don't want to bother figuring out all the moving parts.

I see you mention client setup in passing at the end, but do you have a suggestions for a more complete guide for setting up things client-side? I've yet to find one.

It's hidden, but is it encrypted?

All hidden services encrypt the connection (its part of the tor protocol), so yes.

In case the parent meant "end to end" encrypted, no, of course the IRC server can see all the messages, but if you're the one setting up the chatroom for you and your friends, it's a bit of a moot point, the chat will be encrypted and anonymous as far as anyone outside the chat is concerned.

Various IRC clients have OTR plugins though, for the truly paranoid:

https://irssi.org/documentation/help/otr/

https://github.com/onezero1/xchat-otr

There's more listed here from the people who built and designed the libraries:

https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/software.php

NB, OTR is old and I can't vouch for its crypto, do your research if for some reason you're connecting to an irc server with a hostile admin where you absolutely have to exchange compromising information. (Duh)

OTR is inherently 1 on 1. Any idea how you can make it work for group discussions?

Nobody on IRC uses OTR, people just talk unencrypted, trusting the server.

It isn't that bad tho when its your friends IRC server.

Exactly. People should use IRC as a tool for communications that don't really need encryption. If you are someone's high-value target, don't use IRC.

I think the point is more - there is no point end to end encrypting if the middle man (the irc server) is also part of the conversation (your friend). encryption cannot protect you from the person you are talking to only from the people trying to evesdrop.

I've used it to talk to people in the past. It is uncommon but not unheard of.

I don't know why you were downvoted, I had the same question. Port 6667 means to me that it's plaintext, but it looks like hidden services don't have the "exit node leak" problem clients have with plaintext protocols because they're not involved in the traffic with the hidden services. It looks like the traffic's encrypted all the way.

Sounds like a massive pain in the ass for just messaging friends. Both IRC and Tor are pretty mobile hostile. Would be much more practical to use an end to end encrypted IM platform on the clearnet. Matrix fits pretty well here.

That said, I'm told almost the majority of traffic observed through tor is IRC. For botnet control.

Some people want anonymity. Mobile phones do not provide it.

Yes they do? You can install system wide Tor on android. If you are referring to the fact that phones emit signals that can be triangulated, that doesn't interfere with anonymity in and of itself.

The fact that towers can ID which phones go where does interfere however.

I mean, it literally interferes with anonymity in the most fundamental way.

"Everywhere you go, even when you're not actively using your phone, it's still listening." - Edward Snowden

With a SIM card, you are by definition always tracked and identified individually. It's how the technology is designed to function. You can remove the SIM card, harden your OS, randomize your Wifi MAC but at that point you aren't really using a _cell phone_ anymore.

You could use the same argument for the radios in your home and WiFi. And anonymity is about your name. If they can locate your phone but not be used to identify you then it doesn't break anonymity.

mobile hostile how ? I found tor browser on android pretty lean (quite surprisingly so)

In terms of bandwidth, compute resources and also just the amount of time the modem has to remain powered on to transmit data.

Matrix makes sense for private invite-based chats, but for that we have Signal. I think some of the DID/pseudonymity features Dorsey's AT protocol will be the best future bet for facilitating true desire and revealed preferences. Matrix feels a bit derivative, solving a problem too late for a community that may have aged out and dispersed. It would have been the best IRC/SILC alternative ever, if the culture still supported the interaction model of those prior techs.

It's not so much that internet protocols are hostile as cellular internet connections are bad (random round trip time leads to TCP back-off, often no ipv4) and smart phones are energy limited re: radio modem activity (can't hold open a TCP connection).

They require crutches and compromises to be made to participate in the internet. Usually this is in the form of a incorporated entity doing the hand holding.

The behavior you describe with cell phones is also how overall internet access works in many geographic regions.

There are areas where residential internet is fast and reliable, but if you’re building a service that sucks on bandwidth/energy/throughput constrained links, you’re building a service that’s not viable for tons of users.

You're right. In the last decade or so the capabilities of the average internet user have degraded significantly. Should we handicap all software to accommodate these people? Profit motive says yes and incorporated entities surely will do so. But it is not the right move for human persons.

The people with bad internet connections are human persons.

The idea that to make something that works for those people we have to make systems that are worse for people with fast internet is a false dichotomy. We can (and should) make services and systems that work well for everybody.

How exactly is it handicapped? Last I saw, modern software like Matrix does everything IRC does and 100x more.

That's exactly it. Mobile phone users have to use things like matrix with extremely heavy protocol overhead and someone else hosting their client software and maintaining connection (for the vast majority it's element.io in browser using their owned matrix.org homeserver).

Note for mobile users: you can setup quassel server to connect to IRC and use the quassel client on your phone. The quassel server acts as an intermediary that keeps the IRC connection stable.

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