In these paranoid post-NSA times, you'd be forgiven for worrying about the security of your communications. Are your private conversations on Twitter, Facebook or Skype really private, or are they being stored on some shadowy organisations' servers in perpituity? Is something you thought was said in confidence going to come back to haunt you at some unknown time in the future? A lot of developers are asking themselves these kinds of questions, and we're starting to see the emergence of decentralized messaging systems. Here are a couple of these projects which look promising. Although still under active development, they both have clients available which are usable
right now by adventurous alpha testers:
- Project Tox is a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) instant messaging application aimed to replace Skype. It aims to be an easy to use, all-in-one communication platform (including audio, and videochats in the future) that ensures their users full privacy and secure message delivery. Outlines of the DHT and Lossless UDP protocols used, and a recent post on reddit has more information, and details of different client apps available.
- twister is built on Bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols to deliver a peer-to-peer microblogging system, a secure decentralized alternative to Twitter. The download page has links to source code and Win32 binaries and an installable Android package is available for users who have 'Unknown sources' enabled.
- And while it's not a messing system per se , I2P may also be of interest as an 'anonymous overlay network' which also provides access to secure blogging and email among other features and is available on many platforms .
One thing to bear in mind -- communication software is only as useful as the people using it, so if you want to talk to your friends with either of these, now's the time to start convincing them to adopt...