Trilight Zone

[thedark]

A BNC, or a Bouncer - is used in conjunction with IRC as a way of hiding your host when people /whois you. On most IRC networks, your host isnt masked when you whois, meaning the entire IP appears, like 194.2.0.21, which can be resolved. On other networks, your host might be masked, like IRCnetwork-0.1 but it can still give valuable information, like nationality if your host is not a IP, but a DNS resolved host, like my.host.cn would be masked to IRCnetwork-host.cn but this would still tell the person who whoised you, that you are from China.

To keep information such as this hidden from the other users on an IRC network, many people use a Bouncer, which is actually just a Proxy. Let us first draw a schematic of how a normal connection would look, with and without a BNC installed.