“A military body goes through myriad transformations, in which everything is blended. Nothing is not orthodox, nothing is not unorthodox.” -The Art of War, Chapter 2: On Waging Battle

It has been years since I’ve been on IRC regularly. I think I first got on IRC back in 1995ish when I moved from AOL over to a real ISP and thus needed to find a new place to chat. While I didn’t really chat about anything technical, I stayed a near regularly in IRC until after college when around 2002 I kinda drifted away. I mostly stuck to gaming chats and once my gaming took a lull so too did my IRC days.

However, more and more I see security/technical groups with a presence on IRC, particularly freenode.net. As such, I started my next mini-project last night to get my ass back on IRC regularly. My one requirement for doing so, though, is that I want to be able to hide my host name (IP) or otherwise mask/reroute it. I don’t really have any external servers available to proxy or bounce off of, but I think freenode itself will let me cloak my host name, which might be enough. Of note, I read up on bouncers and might put one up on my server just to see what that is all about.

Fun times, and it’ll be nice to get back on IRC for some shoulder-rubbing. I also need to get my ass on a forum somewhere as well, but that is predicated on getting at least one of my systems up on a proxy somewhere (something I should do anyway). Yes, I like my privacy and I dislike making a target of myself…and no, I don’t antagonize people or anything. I just prefer obfuscation for as long as it holds out.

If I get on freenode, I’ll be authed as LonerVamp, of course.