InvisibleNet Presents IIP

An anonymous submitter writes: "A new and ever growing project has launched into the alternative network realm, changing the pace by focusing directly on speech, rather than file sharing. The Invisible Irc Project, a peer distributed secure and anonymous internet relay chat network has popped up at some of the recent conventions this past year. The creator, and project leader, known as 0x90, has been seen at CodeCon 2002 introducing it to the public, at that time in more of a primitive state, and today, almost a year later, the software has noticeably been more usable by the masses. 0x90 just gave a talk at ToorCon 2K2 on designing a robust & secure Peer-2-Peer framework, and their InvisibleNet site just released new software along with a two part interview that was taken in July. A good read that details the depths of their project, including the state it is in now, and the future vision of a privately distributed steganographical crypto-net. I have tried out the software and it is very easy to set up, and it supports the freenixes, OS X, and Win32 machines. You can use any irc client with it seemlessly, and the cryptography is handled transparently within your "IIP" node. It's GPL so peer review is welcome, as it also states this on their site. It appears to have a nice community of users with a range of discussions. So if you have a bit of time on your hands to engage in some chatting online, give this a try. It's alternative, creative, and possibly a standard setting step to securing IRC as we know it."

Comments

DCC and CTCP disabled

[MiDS]

Keep in mind that DCC and CTCP are disabled due to anonymity reasons, you can't use the current IIP network for filetransfer.
But ofcourse you can paste freenet keys and urls.

Secret channels and practical uses?

[Istealmymusic]

I've been using IIP for the past couple months now, but have yet to see a any interesting useful channels. /list only shows -s (non-secret) channels, I'm sure there has to be something more interesting out there... Anyone have any more information?

On a related note, on IIP you can /mode #channel +a to make even the nicknames anonymous. Yours still shows up in your own client though, but others will see you as "Anonymous". Pretty useful, but otherwise theres not much activity on IIP. The technology is there, wheres the application?

distributed irc?

[ergonal]

IIP claims to be peer distributed, but does that mean there's no primary target for packet kiddies to inflict their hundreds of megabits of anger upon? If so, this indeed would be an ideal solution to the massive DDoS problems facing the big IRC networks lately (DALnet in particular).

I think the primary focus of IRC development at the moment should be on inventing methods to stop the packet kiddies, otherwise IRC's lifetime looks pretty bleak. Maybe distributed IRCing is the way to go?