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For the curious, this is InstantBird (which uses Pidgin's libpurple* library for chat and Mozilla for UI/rendering) plus the Off The Record/OTR plugin (for encr

For the curious, this is InstantBird (which uses Pidgin's libpurple* library for chat and Mozilla for UI/rendering) plus the Off The Record/OTR plugin (for encryption of content) plus a Tor client. Note that InstandBird last had a release in December 2013 and their blog was abandoned in July 2014, so their future is a bit up in the air even though commits still happen on the Mercurial repository at Mozilla. Pidgin has released multiple security updates since the December 2013 release of InstantBird 1.5. I'm unsure if the Tor folks have incorporated these changes offhand. They use the clunky gitweb client for web browsing of their repository and I don't have time to clone a git repo at the moment. It's also worth noting that Pidgin's libpurple uses XMPP for Facebook and Google chats, neither of which will work well any longer due to both of them deprecating XMPP. If you'd like to use secure chat and are unconcerned with the meta-data, there are quite a few better options at present. If you'd like to use secure chat over Tor, you can use any of those options over the Tor network manually. This does have a lot of promise for making it easier for a regular end user, though, so testing and feedback are encouraged. *Update - According to a comment reference below, they now build without libpurple using their own custom Javascript libraries.

middleclick 11y ago
Instantbird still seems to be under very active development. See the comm-central repository, which is Instantbird. Tor Messenger does not seem to be using libpurple, at least judging by the comments here: https://lwn.net/Articles/662471/#Comments https://lwn.net/Articles/662471/#Comments. And I tried it with Google Talk and it works. Wikipedia says that Google Talk as a client was deprecated but you can still use it with third-party clients like Pidgin, Tor Messenger, etc.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  That's surprising. Thanks for the link. So, they rewrote all of libpurple's chat handling in Javascript? You can still mostly connect into Google via XMPP, it's just a bit clunky. And it doesn't work as a true XMPP service as you can't connect to anyone but Google with it. I'm using it in Pidgin right now.
mkishi 11y ago
Could you point me to those options? I haven't been able to find something that works for me.
nieve 11y ago
I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but putting the OTR plugin in the middle of a list of pre-existing software makes it look like they used one. There wasn't one and they had to write a new one for InstantBird wrapping libotr: https://github.com/arlolra/ctypes-otr https://github.com/arlolra/ctypes-otr

middleclick 11y ago

Instantbird still seems to be under very active development. See the comm-central repository, which is Instantbird. Tor Messenger does not seem to be using libpurple, at least judging by the comments here: https://lwn.net/Articles/662471/#Comments https://lwn.net/Articles/662471/#Comments. And I tried it with Google Talk and it works. Wikipedia says that Google Talk as a client was deprecated but you can still use it with third-party clients like Pidgin, Tor Messenger, etc.

JohnTHaller 11y ago
That's surprising. Thanks for the link. So, they rewrote all of libpurple's chat handling in Javascript? You can still mostly connect into Google via XMPP, it's just a bit clunky. And it doesn't work as a true XMPP service as you can't connect to anyone but Google with it. I'm using it in Pidgin right now.

mkishi 11y ago

Could you point me to those options? I haven't been able to find something that works for me.

nieve 11y ago

I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but putting the OTR plugin in the middle of a list of pre-existing software makes it look like they used one. There wasn't one and they had to write a new one for InstantBird wrapping libotr: https://github.com/arlolra/ctypes-otr https://github.com/arlolra/ctypes-otr