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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by leak usernames? It would leaks that a username uses tor. It would still leak that all of the usernames connecting to the same IRC host would be the same person.

IRC seems pretty dangerous if you want to remaining anonymous considering how many people are logging disconnection times allowing them to be correlated with other network disruption events.

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Tor is anonymizing you primarily from the network. There are many use cases where you do want to be authenticated/known to whoever you are talking to. You just want observers to not know.

In your example of correlation of connection times, it may not be your goal to remain anonymous from the network and its participants, you may be interested in the location-hiding properties, and/or adversarial networks (like local government or corporate networks) and firewalls.

Irssi iirc used to default your username to your system username, so noobs would leak their given name by accident. After seeing that I changed my username in Linux to always be the most common username

What is the most common Linux username though? Obviously you don’t want to do your regular work as root. And guest has its own issues.

Is there a “common name”?

Not sure about "most common", but I have some vms that use `user` as the username.

admin

ubuntu

root

Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- Roberts

root?

I was talking more about you using HexChat with your preferred username "FooBar", but then when on Tor you want to be "SpamEggs". If you launch HexChat through oniux and it reads your config file, you might hit the login button before changing your name from FooBar to SpamEggs.

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