Invisible IRC Project

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The InvisibleNet IRC Project's 'Invisible IRC proxy' (IIP) was a deniable pseudonymous IRC server, used to forward IRC connections from downstream clients in such a way that it becomes impossible for the main IRC server to determine the identity of each chatter.

Deniability was provided by the way in which it was impossible for the IRC server to tell the difference between a person running the IIP proxy, and a person connecting to it from elsewhere.

IIP was used for connecting to several active IRC channels with lively debates on a various topics. It was particularly popular with the Freenet community as a real-time anonymous complement to Freenet.

In May of 2004, InvisibleNet, the company behind IIP, announced the hardware breakdown of the central IRC server, and with it the effective death of IIP. More general anonymizing P2P projects such as I2P are being developed to provide more robust replacements.