I don't know about the rest of the community, but I happen to be a heavy user of Skype to talk to my fellow zoos. Skype is a great way to get to know people closer, and is allows an active path of communication.
However, Skype is not without its own issues. There are quite a few issues with security, message sending can be quite sluggish at times, and the clients themselves are even poorly designed. Especially the Android clients, it seems. Many friends as well as myself use the android client to communicate and it has an awful tendency to act up in some very negative ways, such as not loading messages or freezing on their new arrival.
I have done a short bit of searching and have found an up-and-coming chat client called Wickr. All messages that are sent through wickr are encrypted and decrypted locally, so it provides more security than services like skype. I have read about it a little bit and I quite like the application itself as well as the direction the CEO is looking to take the company.
I was just wondering if anyone else had heard of this client. It looks very anonymous and good for applications such as meeting other members of the community. It only requires you to set up the account with a username and password, so no having to give out emails or phone numbers or anything else.
Anyone else heard of it? Any thoughts?
Here's some links:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/27/wickr-timeline-cat-pics/
Just something to ponder over...
I hadn't heard of it before, but after a cursory glance I have one primary concern: it's proprietary; I tend to distrust corporations until proven otherwise. Other than that, it seems to be reasonably secure and anonymous to me.
Another chat client that might be of interest to the community is tox. Tox is decentralized and end-to-end encrypted, so there aren't any central servers that you're depending on the goodwill of a company to keep running, but that means that your ip address is exposed to the world. Of course, if you're clever (and lucky) enough, you can run tox over tor and get both end-to-end encryption and anonimity.
Well, to my understanding they have everything freely available to be looked through. They even have a $100,000 bounty for those who find a bug. Skype is well known for its security issues though, where everything is knowingly logged and any encryption would be handled by Microsoft's servers instead of each individual device.
I never heard of it, but what someone else has already stated its proprietary, and security through obscurity is not something I trust.
It uses well-known encryption methods stated on their site and has the code open for people to find bugs with a $100,000 bounty as motivation
That is a hilariously appropriate name for a proposed chat client to be used by zoos.
I don't get why it's such an appropriate name for us. Neopagans, sure, but us?
Found the dog zoo.... Think the sound a horse makes....
Oh, yes. I get it now. :P
When I think of horse noises, the first thing that comes out is "WrnHhHhHrrr".
What's a whinny. The other sound they make, "pbhhpbhpbh" is a whicker.
Hm, well I set myself up. Same username as usual.
As long as they do not provide the full source code you can not know whether what you can download on their website is actually the code that was reviewed.
It seems all messages are sent to their servers and they deliver them then. Even if they don't know your username, they still know your IP address and eventually they know the IP address of the user you are writing this message to. They claim they do not store this metadata, but how are you going to verify that?
We aren't persecuted so much that it is an actual problem, but in theory the NSA could monitor their servers and if they have the IP addresses of known zoophiles and some other IP addresses turn out to talk with them a lot, they could be put on the same list "to investigate"...
It's not ready yet, but things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_%28software%29 look much more promising.
Keep in mind we are looking at a Skype alternative. I'm willing to migrate a few time while waiting for just the right one. All these problems are already inherent in Skype.
It seems to me a good outlet for communication would be something like good ol' IRC over an encrypted and peer-to-peer relayed darknet such as i2p...
but then again, this would require setup beyond "double-click and go" and I'm not sure I can assume all zoos have that knowledge or will to go through with it... hehe. I'm just an old encryption and anonymity nerd so of course I would.
On top of that, I've yet to see an IRC client for mobile that I actually like :P
There are some that are decent... but add "free" to the equation and it gets much harder!
I never use mobile for much though, so perhaps I am not the best judge.
I live a pretty busy lifestyle so having the ability to chat while mobile is very important to me... Something skype is kind of barring me from doing at the moment with their intermittent errors.
Understood. I'm not particularly attached to IRC, I'm just saying why reinvent the wheel instead of using an existing thing over a secure protocol?