Pirate Software, week 6: Pidgin + OTR

I was never into IRC for direct chat in the early days of the net. For me the whole concept started with ICQ in 1996, and then with Yahoo Messenger in 1999. These products used proprietary protocols for communication, and were never secure. They also quickly became bloatware and painful to use since they tried to expand into being much more than "lowly" chat.

But chat will never go away, as we value direct conversations. Today many people mostly use Skype for chat, which is a bad idea for many reasons:

1. It doesn't use an open protocol, so it is very hard, almost impossible, to put Skype to use except through the official Skype client.
2. Your messages aren't encrypted between you and your chat partner, so your conversation can (and in some cases probably is) monitored. Remember that Skype offers phone calls to normal phones, and to be allowed to connect with the public phone system, they have to comply with lots of government regulation, of which machinery for wire-tapping by police is one.
3. It isn't open source, so it is unclear how things works.
4. Also Skype has become bloatware.

A very good alternative is Pidgin, which is an open source chat client with which you can connect to IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, the open protocol XMPP and many many more. It works with Windows, Mac and many versions of Linux.

Plus it supports OTR, which is an easy to install plugin that offers (quoting directly from the website):

• Encryption - No one else can read your instant messages.
• Authentication - You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.
• Deniability - The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However, during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.
• Perfect forward secrecy - If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.

So, install Pidgin and OTR and see if it works well for you. You can try out OTR with me if you like. My ICQ id is 309394, and my Yahoo id is mats_henricson.

If you are curious about chat in general, EFF has a very good page.