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TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

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Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#81

Post by commentzorro »

nvk wrote: post #78
commentzorro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that parent has the knowledge, ability, and time to do this task? I see this "it's open source, make pull request" type of comment quite a lot but don't understand how you'd know if the person you're saying it to could do it. If not, it's kind of a dick move, isn't it?

The way the feature was requested, come across as a dick move and very self entitled. The least the parent could have done is added some niceties or some reasoning in more than 4 words when asking something for free.

I know, people make the "I'd use it but for this feature" comment all the time. But I believe they do it without thinking rather than with the intent of being unkind. The "... pull request" is almost certainly knowingly mean spirited. (Even if true.)

Edit: here's a possibly better response than the "do it yourself" response:

XXX is a free and open source project. That means the developers put in the majority of their time on the issues that they want and enjoy coding the most, even if other good features are left out. If you're unable to help out with coding yourself, you could look through the open and closed issues and see of others have thought about your feature request too. If an open issue exists, a short "while I don't have the ability to code this, I'd like this feature too," added to the list would let the developers gauge interest and may sway someone into giving it a try. Thanks.

Edit 2: It's a bit long. This sentiment but shorter.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#82

Post by mxuribe »

mei0Iesh wrote: post #71
lucaspiller wrote: post #28

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?

Do you (or does anyone) know if the wire protocol is open source as well? I see from their website that some of the apps are...but not sure of the protocol...? Because if so, then "someone" could technically retrofit it to "allow decentralization someday".

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#83

Post by daveloyall »

mei0Iesh wrote: post #71
lucaspiller wrote: post #28

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?

Citations, please! I haven't heard that decentalization is a goal of theirs.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#84

Post by daveloyall »

lucaspiller wrote: post #28

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?

I think your distinction between gov't tracking and corporate tracking is misguided.

Tech that provably prevents one will provably prevent the other.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#85

Post by daveloyall »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #75
lucaspiller wrote: post #28

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…

I know this is a lofty goal... We need an open mobile platform.

Presently, mobile devices aren't (effective) general purpose computers. That must change.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#86

Post by jnthn »

mxuribe wrote: post #82
mei0Iesh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you (or does anyone) know if the wire protocol is open source as well? I see from their website that some of the apps are...but not sure of the protocol...? Because if so, then "someone" could technically retrofit it to "allow decentralization someday".

Check out https://github.com/wireapp/proteus/

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#87

Post by iphy »

zhovner wrote: post #4

Still no contacts sync?

This is a much wanted feature, and I have long term plans to solve this issue together with a lot of other issues using a distributed data store (file system, database, whatever you want to call it). See https://toktok.github.io/roadmap#distributed-file-system (milestone 9). More realistically, i.e. in the nearer future, milestone 4 (https://toktok.github.io/roadmap#optimisations-for-mobile) covers a simple multi-device feature.

GrayHatter has implemented a prototype and will deliver a design document for the full implementation likely by the end of Q4. It includes profile and contact sync as well as message history sync. If we follow the intended timeline, that feature would likely land somewhere in 2017Q1. uTox and qTox have preliminary support for the prototype.

You and everybody else are invited to review the proposal when it comes out. Be sure to follow the issues on https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues. You are also invited to join #toktok on Freenode to bounce ideas around.

Offline messaging will be partially solved by message log sync, as mentioned in milestone 4. The idea is that if you have a desktop computer at home, you could sync the message from your phone to it, and the desktop computer will deliver the message to your friend when they come online. It could be that your desktop syncs with their desktop at some point, and later their desktop syncs with their phone which is the actual delivery. In any case, this solution requires at least one of your and their devices to be online at one point. So far, we have shied away from storing large amounts of data in the network itself. I think the described solutions are sufficient for a large group of users. Federated (email-like) server-based (still distributed, just not p2p) solutions could be used for the remainder.

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#89

Post by nickpsecurity »

iphy wrote: post #45
eeZah7Ux wrote: post #19

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

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?

Re: TOX – A New Kind of Instant Messaging

#90

Post by ninesigns »

lucaspiller wrote: post #28

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
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