[tor-talk] irc clients and Tor

[Robert Ransom]

On 2012-02-09, Jacob Appelbaum <jacob at appelbaum.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Recently my main IRC bounce went down and I decided to redo things. I'd
> like to help save people some time and also to give some advice for
> people who want to use irssi or similar clients to connect to the Tor
> development channels.
>
> Basically using Tor and irssi is intolerable - it doesn't work with
> privoxy chained to Tor if you want to use SSL/TLS. As far as I can tell,
> it's not possible to use any SOCKS proxy safely if at all without major
> pain. torsocks doesn't work for reasons that I can't easily debug and so
> I took the kernel filter path...

I suspect that the breakage in irssi+torsocks is that irssi uses
non-blocking sockets, and the version of torsocks shipped in Debian
Squeeze doesn't handle non-blocking sockets correctly.  I've heard
that a later version of torsocks does work correctly on programs which
use non-blocking sockets.


Robert Ransom