+++ Jun-02: New version 0.9.9.277 changelog +++

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If you like this software then maybe you want to buy me a beer

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TorChat

TorChat is a peer to peer instant messenger with a completely decentralized design, built on top of Tor's location hidden services, giving you extremely strong anonymity while being very easy to use without the need to install or configure anything.

TorChat just runs from an USB drive on any Windows PC. (It can run on Linux and Mac too, in fact it was developed on Linux with cross platform usability in mind from the very first moment on, but the installation on other platforms than Windows is a bit more complicated at the moment)

Tor location hidden services basically means:

• Nobody will be able to find out where you are.
• If they are already observing you and sniff your internet connection they will not be able to find out
• what you send or receive (everything is end-to-end encrypted)
• to whom you are sending or receiving from
• where your contacts are located

General information about Tor

• official site of the Tor project
• location hidden services
• Tor at wikipedia

The Tor binary which is bundled with TorChat is taken from the official Tor-0.1.2.19 installer. You can binary compare the tor.exe with the official one to verify this or replace it with your own version of tor.exe if you like.

Installation

Windows

There basically is no need for any installation or configuration. It just runs out of the box, all batteries are included. Download and unzip the complete archive to somewhere on your harddisk or USB-Drive. The program is inside the folder "bin". Just doubleclick the blue earth symbol named "torchat" or "torchat.exe" and you are done.

It may be possible that you need to search, download and apply the "Event ID 4226 Patcher (4226 fix)" if you have Windows XP SP2. (Newer Windows versions limit the Number of concurrent TCP/IP connection attempts to such a ridiculously small number that most network intensive applications are massively slowed down)

At the moment it is not possible to configure the binary version of TorChat (torchat.exe) to any other ports. You can not use it without the bundled tor.exe. It is all hardcoded (TorChat listening on localhost:11009 and tor.exe listening on localhost:11109). If you want to use your already installed tor service on say localhost:9050 or even some.other.machine:9050 you must configure tc_client.py and run the modified version from source. Therefore you will need Python-2.5 and wxPython-2.8 installed. To avoid the black dos-box when running from source you can rename torchat.py to torchat.pyw.

In one of the next versions there will be a comfortable configuration dialog and an easy to understand small configuration file that will make it possible to completely customize all port numbers and adresses so you can easyly make it run in any configuration you can think of.

The program is being developed on Linux and tested on XP. If you use Windows Vista I would very much appreciate any feedback, wether it runs or not. Until now I have no confirmation for this operating system at all. If it works, please send me a mail, if it doesn't please send me a mail too, preferably with as much helpful information as you are able to provide.

Linux

You will also need python2.5, python-wxgtk2.8 (aka wxPython) and Tor. Download the torchat-x.x.x.x.deb package and do

dpkg -i torchat-x.x.x.x.deb

where x.x.x.x should be replaced by the current version number. After that you can start it from the commandline with the command torchat or from the start menu of your desktop environment.

If you are on Debian Etch then you may have problems satisfying the above mentioned dependencies, but since you are using the stale version of Debian, I can safely assume you are not interested in using new technologies like TorChat anyway.

On non debian based distributions make sure you have the above mentioned dependencies installed, then download the source distribution of TorChat, unzip it somewhere into your home folder and just execute it from within the src directory with the command

python torchat.py.

It doesn't work?

Please let me know about every unexpected behaviour, I need your feedback! There have been a few versions which under certain circumstances didn't work at all. At the moment I upload a new version every few days and with every version it is becoming more stable and robust. You can also always try the latest version from SVN, they usually work because i try to avoid committing totally broken revisions.

You can reach me via E-Mail or of course via TorChat, just use the "Ask Bernd" menu option and I will be added to your buddy list. My native language is german, but you can also talk to me in english.

Usage

This is how it should look like:

You will see a window with your contact list. One of the contacts is labled "myself". This 16 numbers and letters are your unique address inside the Tor-Network. Wait a few minutes until the icon becomes green. Give this address to your friends so that they can add you to their list or add your friends address to your list. It all basically behaves like you would expect from an instant messenger.

After starting TorChat it can sometimes take up to 15 Minutes until you will become available. There is a hardcoded time-to-live of 15 minutes for already fetched service descriptors inside the Tor proxy. I have yet to find a way to invalidate this cache without restarting Tor.

You can run TorChat from an USB-Drive and no matter where you are, you always have the same address as long as you don't delete the files in the folder tor\hidden_service. The contents of this folder are your key. They must always be kept secret. If someone wants to impersonate your identity he must and will try to steal the contents of this folder from you. Keep this always in mind. It would probably be a good idea to use TorChat in conjunction with something like TrueCrypt or at least a password protected USB-Drive to protect your key file.

Contact information

Bernd Kreuss

• E-Mail: prof7bit@googlemail.com
• E-Mail: 7bit@arcor.de
• TorChat: utvrla6mjdypbyw6

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If you want to buy me a beer: