Tor [The Onion Router] is an amazing project. It offers strong anonymity and is a priceless application if you value your identity, freedom, privacy, or anonymity when using the Internet. Here's a overview of what tor does described by the tor project:"Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it encrypts everything
between you and the Tor network and everything inside the Tor network,
but it can't encrypt your traffic between the Tor network and its final destination. If you are communicating sensitive information, you
should use as much care as you would on the normal scary Internet —
use HTTPS or other end-to-end encryption and authentication."

From this we can gather that if a competent user utilizes a few tools available, anonymity is truly available with a surprising amount of ease. Just as in any well thought out security protocol, multiple layers of security should be combined to create a sufficient solution.

Chat Solutions:

 Using Pidgin alongside OTR encryption is a very strong solution all it's own for having secure, private conversion across the web. Combining these two solutions with tor takes things to an entirely new level. In short using these technologies we can have a secure tunnel from which your conversation will travel through. Offering secure chat which we then plug in to tor, causing that connection to be routed all throughout the world masking it's origin, instant messaging at it's best. 

Combining many common applications with tor has become much simpler with torsocks. Torsocks is a tool that allows you to make sock connections with many applications much easier than trying to individually setup the applications, one by one. One of the added features is that torsocks can force all DNS queries for those and other applications to be routed through tor.

To illustrate how this works, let's get a few things installed to make this a bit more interactive. I run Ubuntu Linux, so naturally the commands listed here are for setting this up on Ubuntu, I'm using Ubuntu Karmic Koala, version 9.10 with the '2.6.31-20-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP' kernel installed at the moment.

First things first let's get Tor, Privoxy, and Vidalia working to establish our foundation.

Tor is in the Ubuntu repositories but many have had issues so I chose to use a repository from Launchpad.net which create builds of tor and vidalia regularly which remain compatible.

adding  ppa which contains the tor and vidalia builds

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sevenmachines/tor

We now update the sources

sudo apt-get update

Remove any previous installations of tor & vidalia


apt-get -y remove tor vidalia 

Install tor and vidalia


apt-get -y install tor vidalia


This ensures successful installation on my system, and that no previous install attempts hinder my new install, and that the ppa packages gets installed. While we are here, let's go ahead and install privoxy, pidgin, and the OTR plugin.

apt-get -y install pidgin-otr privoxy
/*Note if you do not wish to use encryption for pidgin, skip this step.*/


We are now going to install torsocks:

hitman@localhost#cd /usr/local/bin
hitman@localhost#mkdir torsocks
hitman@localhost#cd torsocks && wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/37090887/torsocks_1.0%7Eepsilon%2Bdfsg1-1_...

hitman@localhost#dpkg -i torsocks_1.0~epsilon+dfsg1-1_i386.deb

At this point we have all of the necessary apps installed we just have to configure them. First double check privoxy to ensure that it is using the correct port for tor:

Scroll through '/etc/privoxy/config' with your favorite text editor ensure that you see this;

#

listen-address  localhost:8118

forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 .

#

Now that we have modified the configuration, let's restart privoxy:

you@host$sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart

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Now fire up vidalia, and once tor is successfully connected, you are up and running.
Since we installed torsocks we can now use simple commands to launch applications using tor.

hitman@localhost$usewithtor pidgin

For a little background and for any questions I recommend:

hitman@localhost$man usewithtor
hitman@localhost$man torsocks

As a side note: Using Tor alongside a good set of blocklists using ipblock is a very effective setup. Now that you have Tor/vidalia/privoxy/torsocks setup, you can use them together to run your bittorrent tracker and DHT through, IRC, Evolution, and other applications.