IIP was conceived by freenet enthusiasts as a place for real-time anonymous chatting--a securely anonymous, encrypted
IRC. The ultimate goal is IRC over
freenet, but anyone who has used freenet or
frost recently knows that chat over it would be a futile exercise in lag and dropped messages.
The founder and chief developer of IIP is known only as [0x90]. IIP is written in C and has an architecture modeled after freenet. Nodes connect to other nodes and relay encrypted messages. Random messages are "spurted" from nodes occasionally to thwart traffic analysis. Hiding somewhere on the network is an ircd. Individuals run nodes on their computer which access this ircd through the IIP network, and proxy this server to the localhost. Then the user can connect with any irc client to localhost, and use IIP as if it were normal IRC.
The two main channels hosted on IIP are #iip, for IIP development related chat, and a general chat room #anonymous. There is a gateway to #freenet from Openprojects.net as well. The major developer of IIP are all known to hang around this cozy little network.
Right now, the main problem with IIP is the centralization of the hidden ircd server. The next major version of IIP will distribute this functionality across the individual nodes.
IIP's homepage is at http://www.invisiblenet.net/iip and is also mirrored to freenet, although difficult to access there these days.