Tor is well known as the anonymous Internet communication network, the common practice is to bind tor with privoxy for the anonymous network surfing.

Beyond of this, tor also open a tunnel on the firewall. Suppose you live in irc.freenode.net but the port 6667 is blocked by the firewall. You can torify irssi to using the hidden service, and keep you IP private, — one stone kills two birds!

Add this line to /etc/tor/torrc

Run irssi in torified mode:

In irssi, /conn 10.40.40.40 to access irc.freenode.net

If you don’t have the privilege to access /etc/tor/torrc, you need socat to relay the tor network to your local socket proxy:

Then you can run irssi and /conn localhost

There is a more detailed HOWTO about the onion router.