Connecting to Qubes IRC Chat with Whonix

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I noticed there was a way to chat with the Qubes community via IRC:

I know there’s this forum + mail lists, however I am more familiar with chat-based social media such as Discord, and it seems the IRC Chat is the closest thing to that.

I have never used IRC before, but after doing a bit of research, apparently it’s recommended to use some sort of VPN / Tor to connect to the IRC chats.

My questions are:

  1. Is it recommend to just connect to the Qubes IRC Chat (#qubes in irc.libera.chat) without any sort of VPN / Tor, i.e - would your IP address be exposed if not?

  2. If using Tor to connect, is there any sort of recommended IRC client? I’ve tried using Web Clients but I don’t think they allow for the customization options needed to connect with Tor. This post references HexChat, which apparently was discontinued recently - so I assume would no longer be a secure client?

Basically I want to be able to connect to the Qubes IRC chat, but I’m relatively new to the whole security / privacy thing, and don’t want to accidentally end up exposing my IP to whoever while just trying to chat.

Thank you.

1 Like
2

Just use whatever IRC client you want in a qube, but assign sys-whonix as the netvm of this qube, this will route all TCP traffic (IRC is using TCP) through Tor (and discard non TCP traffic).

3

Thanks, just want to confirm, are the 2 chats listed here different, or are they 2 different ways of connecting to the same chat?

If they are 2 different chats, is it recommended to join both? Is one more popular than the other etc…

4

I’m on neither so I can’t tell. You should join both and see which one is more active than the other. The matrix channel requires an account to join, whereas IRC doesn’t require any account.

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5

Thanks for your help.

6

Liberachat blocks Tor/VPN IP ranges but allows them if they are registered with SASL, but to register with SASL you must connect to irc.libera.chat/6697 (with SASL setup) and create an account by messaging a bot. But you can’t connect to register in the first place, since Tor/VPN IPs are blocked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/zaci2s/connecting_to_the_monero_irc_over_tor/

You can use matrix instead, just register the account using some thowaway email address.

7

Yeah, unfortunately I had to temporarily connect to Libera.Chat outside of Tor just to register, but now I’ve managed to successfully connect via Tor.
Whole thing felt a bit weird, sending a password to some bot in plain text etc… but whatever.

For anyone that’s interested, I connected to both the IRC & Matrix Channel.

Both didn’t seem that active, although it is a Bank Holiday Monday.

8

I should take a closer look at this, as I was rejoicing to see libera.chat offering .onion URL’s for irc-clients to connect to. So, what you are saying is, I can’t use the libera.chat’s onion URLs for connecting to the qubesos irc rooms, before I doxx myself with a clearnet IP?

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9

Yes.

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