Oh, there are other ways of faking hostnames, depending on your level of access to systems (your closest nameserver, for example). My point was that it's not quite as convenient to have anon IRC (or any other IP protocol) as it is to send anon mail through a remailer.
In that case one of us (who owns a machine directly plugged into the net) should set up an anon server that doesn't check for user/host names, or better yet, provide a bouncing off point for anonymous telnet... Say something like you telnet to port 666 on toad.com, and then you're given an anonymous temporary id. At that point, you are prompted with a menu for what to do... telnet to another site, ftp into another side, call an IRC server from somewhere, etc. All the anon server would have to do is bounce packets... I think this idea came up before... an anon packet forwarding service of sorts... If a user goes through several of these, s/he is granted pretty decent anonimity... Perhaps another play on this would work with encrypted packets? Where each user who dials into one of these packet bouncers talks to it via a PGP like RSA and key-exchange system. All the IRC server will see is that someone named anon7 logged in from eminar.toad.com... Of course if the sysadmins who run irc's are true assholes, they'll blacklist the anons, but if there are enough anon packet bounces on the network, this will be pretty hard. They'll just have to recognize that the right of privacy is one that outweighs their desire to keep logs. Granted anon packet bouncers can be used to throw junk mail or messages thought irc's, but we could install a time delay in the anon forwarding software so that it can receive quickly, but only send slowly. (Slowly enough for one person to type to an IRC, but not for a script to send thousands of messages. Granted, there are still other forms of abuse available, but if we could limit one we could still get somewhere and not have the IRC sysadmins bitch too hard....