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What's the recommended alternative? Don't IRC servers face the same issues of someone being able to read whatever you put through the service?
by ehutch79 7y ago
What's the recommended alternative?
Don't IRC servers face the same issues of someone being able to read whatever you put through the service?
- williamxd3 7y agoTelegram?
- buovjaga 7y agoProprietary & closed source
- ncmncm 7y agoNot end-to-end. Telegram servers see (and log, this is in Russia!) plaintext.
- duskwuff 7y ago1) In the context of a public discussion channel, end-to-end encryption and plaintext logging are features. Their presence means that a person is able to join and see context. This is good. 2) Telegram is not based in Russia. In fact, it's been intermittently blocked in the country.
- ncmncm 7y agoI am corrected.
- Leo_Verto 7y agoMatrix offers the best of both world: federated self-hostable servers, decent UX and the option to E2E-encrypt entire channels.
- jdashg 7y agoNotably, Mozilla has switched from IRC to Matrix.
- zzo38computer 7y agoYes, that is true. (However, for private messages, if you and the other person share a key, you could encrypt the messages before sending them. For public messages, the intention is that someone can read it, so someone being able to read whatever you put through the service is an intentional and desirable feature.) But since this communication is public, anyone should read it if they want to do, so IRC is good.
- shadowgovt 7y agoThe author of the article explicitly waves off IRC and offers some good suggestions at the bottom of the article. (More than privacy concerns, a major concern for IRC in this era of mobile devices is protocol chattiness. Phones save battery power by minimizing messages per second required, and IRC's protocol isn't designed to work well with that architecture).