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OFTC and Tor |
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OFTC also works hard to allow legitimate use of Tor on our network, where and when appropriate. There is even a hidden service onion address that someone has taken upon themselves to maintain, it is however not supported in any official capacity by OFTC.
OFTC does not require users to first connect in the clear and register with services to allow connecting via Tor, however we reserve the right to disable new connections during times of abuse, see below for more information.
You can find more information about Tor itself by connecting and joining the #tor channel.
Take into consideration however that because of the "anonymous" nature of Tor it is often ripe for abuse. That is, spam emanating from or ban evasion by means of connecting via Tor. While we do our best to not adversely effect legitimate or at least civil users of Tor, from time to time an exit node may fall prey to a KLine while we work to mitigate abuse.
OFTC reserves the right to prevent new connections via Tor during times of abuse. That is, users who can maintain their connection will not be affected, however a new connection will be refused. Once OFTC takes this measure (which we often view as a last resort) new connects will be refused so long as we still see the abuse attempts, this duration can range from an hour to day(s).
Some channels may chose to disallow connections from Tor connections. This is the choice of the channel, and not a decision by the network. However, it is also common for channels to allow an exception for identified Tor users, who have turned on their cloak.
If you are having trouble connecting to a channel, try "/msg nickserv set cloak on" and re-attempt the join.
We are working to create a mechanism by which we can allow users who have previously registered an account with services to continue to connect and use OFTC even though we are blocking new anonymous connections. A user must have previously registered however, if they want to connect via Tor while new connections are disabled they will have to then connect in the clear to register. However, when Tor is allowed they will be free to regsiter.
The preferred mechanism for this will likely be an ssl certificate issued from our own trusted CA that users can configure their client (or stunnel/socat) to use and thus the ircd will exempt them from that particular check. It may be that we also allow nickserv identification to exempt users.
The software and policy for these have not yet been written, but work on them is ongoing.