BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#2[deleted]
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#3I love the way BitTorrent Labs are evolving - first with Sync, now Chat. What's next... BitTorrentBook?
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#4Sounds similar to already existing Open-Source projects, like Tox[1] (which was discussed on HN a couple months ago[2].)
Questions for both projects still remain though: What sort of metadata can be collected from users of these programs? How can that metadata be used? Are there any security vulnerabilities that have been overlooked?
We are still a ways from having truly secure chat as the mainstream communication medium, but I'm glad Bittorent and others are helping move it in the right direction.
[1] https://github.com/irungentoo/ProjectTox-Core [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121225
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#5If they don't release the source, like BitTorrent Sync, they might as well just ditch this whole thing right now.
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#6If they don't release the source, like BitTorrent Sync, they might as well just ditch this whole thing right now.
In any other context I would dismiss this comment as a troll, but yeah.. Any program that passes itself off as "secure" and is closed source, in this climate, is immediately suspect.
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#7What's with [RetroShare](retroshare.sourceforge.net)?
Another question: What's the sense of a tool that nobody of your friends uses, especially in social networking? The will not migrate until Facebook etc. shut down
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#8I like that this and Tox are tackling this issue, but they seem to be missing a huge piece of the puzzle: the so-called metadata.
If you can hide who the messages are being sent to, you can protect yourself against them spying on who your friends are, which to me, is just as important. Also, if you don't know who the recipient of an encrypted block of text is, it makes it near-impossible to brute force the private key(s) of all encrypted text coming out of a single IP.
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#9There has been a lot of interesting development on the secure chat front lately ( secure circle, textsecure, heml.is, cryptocat etc ).
Not sure if bittorrent chat will be very interesting. Most secure chat clients encrypt on the client side so the server won't be able to read your messages, so not sure if not having a server is that big of a win here. I'm also guessing metadata would be exposed to various people on the bittorrent chat p2p net.
The one I'm most excited about right now is bitmessage. It is the only chat protocol that I feel is really revolutionary. It is also a p2p network, but the interesting thing about it is that everyone on the network gets every message ( obviously you have to have the correct keys to decrypt the messages that were meant for you ). So its impossible for an observer to tell even who is talking to who. Also they have the concept of public chans , which I think are a good mechanism to draw users. Bittorrent could do the same thing here.
Re: BitTorrent Chat - Private instant messaging via secure, distributed technology
#10What's with [RetroShare](retroshare.sourceforge.net)? Another question: What's the sense of a tool that nobody of your friends uses, especially in social networking? The will not migrate until Facebook etc. shut down
Educate them.