Hacker News Reader

Comment by warcode | Hacker News Reader

"Skype-killers" without end-to-end encryption are useless.

This is really all I want as well. There's tons of pretty messaging apps. Style isn't enough to sway me anymore - I want privacy. How hard is it to make a messaging app that makes encryption its #1 priority?

I've been following Tox with some interest. It's fairly new but fully open source, decentralized, end-to-end encryption, no account needed (people added via their unique bytestring).

https://tox.im/

Tox has interested me more since it's inception, mainly because it's open source and completely relies on peer to peer connections. I've seen some other open source alternatives that aren't as light weight and still centralized to some degree. Wire, if it really wants to be a "Skype killer" in my opinion, should go open source and be more reassuring about how they are protecting our privacy.

I wish this one would market itself as a really good chat application first and privacy second. Privacy etc is of course important but it all feels far too tinfoil hat for myself and too technical I'd imagine for anyone else I know to bother with

Pretty hard, but it's coming. See http://labs.bittorrent.com/bleep

It's closed source.

He didn't ask for an open source application, but for one that focuses on encryption from the get-go.

My first thought as well, why change when nothing have changed.

If they're based on WebRTC then I believe end-to-end encryption is baked into the standard. Whether they use the standard completely is another question.

Where does it say that they are based on WebRTC?

Source code. :P

Articles (http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/3/7325083/wire-chat-service-...) suggest "end to end encryption for voice calls" and encryption to and from their servers for text, but I haven't seen anything about it being WebRTC (unless I missed that on the product's web site).

I'm not sure that them having my messages unencrypted on their servers makes that feature any more desirable than Skype, WhatsApp and the like. Encrypted voice call is good, but in the case they don't say how they do that encryption, it'll remain less-than-trustworthy.

yeah, not so much: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wire-built-by-ex-skype-empl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com