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
o what you send or receive (everything is end-to-end encrypted)
o to whom you are sending or receiving from
o where your contacts are located

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.