Live data from Hacker News

TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

tox.chat

91–100 of 110 posts

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#91

Right now I'm not really bothered about end-to-end encryption. If a government wants to track me, they will find a way. I'm more concerned about Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Apple tracking me, reading my private conversations, and selling my data to the highest bidder. I'd like an open source, decentralised messaging platform, that has good mobile apps. Are suggestions?

Maybe https://wire.com/ could allow decentralization someday?

That's from wire terms of usage: http://dump.bitcheese.net/images/nexikud/wire.jpg

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#92
post #40

Be warned, Tox claims to protect users from "governments", which is a huge claim. Yet, it's written in C, it hasn't had a security audit, it does not publish a list of security risks and mitigations, and, regarding its roots in 4chan, see for yourself: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1186

We're in the process of writing a specification ( https://github.com/TokTok/spec ) and new implementation in Haskell ( https://github.com/TokTok/hs-toxcore ). There is also a Rust implementation in the works ( https://github.com/zetok/tox ). As for security risks and mitigations, I'd like to do that when we have a web presence with space for it. Right now, the web presence is fairly poor ( http://toktok.github.io/ ).…

Rust seems reasonable, but why Haskell? Also why not improve current core while writing new implementation?

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#95
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been the #1 reason that I havent convinced people to use tox yet. I sometimes get up and walk away from a computer mid conversation, expecting to continue the conversation on my phone. It's the same reason I won't be using google allo. I need conversations to "sync" across mobile and PC. I'm not going to sit at a desk all day chatting on my phone, and I'm not going to miss messages just because I went mobile…

> If you have 5 devices linked, tox would behind the scenes send the message to 5 different destinations. I dislike existing systems that implement this kind of model since it is too easy for a ghost device to be getting copies of everything. My phone transitioning to different UX clients with notifications/verifications of transitions on its own UX is better.

I agree that I dont like that system (and may be the reason that it hasnt been done), but I'm not fully sure of alternatives either.

But, I dont think a client should transition from one to the other either. I often just get up and walk away from my computer with chats in the background. I wouldnt want to have to tell it to transition.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#96
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding security audit: my day job is developing high security software. I could do a formal audit, and it would take about 2-3 person-weeks, and be completely useless, because it would result in a huge number of trivial issues that need to be resolved before it could identify real problems. So instead of wasting time and money on that, I've decided to go and fix those trivial issues one by one, and once I'm a bit…

What high-security software do you work on? With what methodologies addressing what risk categories?

I second this. A bibliography of some suggested reading - books, papers, etc. would be much appreciated if you have any.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#97
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're in the process of writing a specification ( https://github.com/TokTok/spec ) and new implementation in Haskell ( https://github.com/TokTok/hs-toxcore ). There is also a Rust implementation in the works ( https://github.com/zetok/tox ). As for security risks and mitigations, I'd like to do that when we have a web presence with space for it. Right now, the web presence is fairly poor ( http://toktok.github.io/ ).…

Rust seems reasonable, but why Haskell? Also why not improve current core while writing new implementation?

We are doing exactly that: we are improving the current core and at the same time modelling the behaviour in Haskell. The Haskell version does not do networking and only represents an executable model of the environment. We use that to test core functionality. See http://toktok.github.io/design/testing.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#98
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust seems reasonable, but why Haskell? Also why not improve current core while writing new implementation?

We are doing exactly that: we are improving the current core and at the same time modelling the behaviour in Haskell. The Haskell version does not do networking and only represents an executable model of the environment. We use that to test core functionality. See http://toktok.github.io/design/testing .

When I was thinking about contributing to Tox it was way too hard to find out its development is alive at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecttox/comments/4vmfhn/is_tox_d...

P.S. Now I see activity in new core repo,that's cool

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#99

Right now I'm not really bothered about end-to-end encryption. If a government wants to track me, they will find a way. I'm more concerned about Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Apple tracking me, reading my private conversations, and selling my data to the highest bidder. I'd like an open source, decentralised messaging platform, that has good mobile apps. Are suggestions?

"If a government wants to track me, they will find a way." So just hand the data right to them? "I'm more concerned about Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Apple tracking me, reading my private conversations, and selling my data to the highest bidder." End-to-end encryption is the only solution to that problem. Open source software and decentralization is nice and all but to become a mobile app it'll have to be compiled and…

-- "Open source software and decentralization is nice and all but to become a mobile app it'll have to be compiled and run on a closed platform and will almost certainly use APIs of that platform." --

That's not necessarily true. End to end encryption doesn't need to be a compiled mobile app or send messages over a closed platform.

We built a decentralized, open source, freely distributable, browser-based Twitter client utilizing end-to-end encryption at www.seecret.io specifically to address that.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#100
post #54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's by design to keep connections with other peers.

That is a fundamentally broken design. There is literally no excuse for a simple messenger app to suck up a gigabyte daily. How do you expect people to adopt this when they have broadband and wireless plans with data caps?

Aside from the data usage - that will suck the battery life from your devices as well
Post reply on HN