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A new generation of software has risen to keep our chats secure.
Open source is helping us all chat and talk. Open source is accelerating our 3D games. Open source doesn’t pay the bills and GnuPG needs your help.
As governments around the world (we’re looking at you UK) become ever more interested in the private conversations of their citizens, it’s become ever more essential to use communication software that values its users’ privacy. Sadly, the big beasts such as Skype and Slack cannot be relied on for this, either through design, in the case of Skype allowing law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop into conversations ( http:// news.softpedia.com/news/SkypeProvided-Backdoor-Access-to-theNSA-Before-Microsoft-TakeoverNYT-362384.shtml), or through bugs and vulnerabilities, such as a recently found issue in Slack that could potentially reveal people’s private chats and message history ( https://www.wired.com/2017/03/ hack-brief-slack-bug-everyonesworst-office-nightmare).
Thankfully for anyone who wants their private conversations to remain exactly that, there are a number of free and open source projects emerging that put the user’s privacy first. One of the most popular services to emerge is Riot ( https://about.riot.im), which offers group chat, VoIP, file transfer and endto-end encryption – basically everything you’d need from a secure instant messaging platform to communicate with friends, family and co-workers.
It can be used through a web client, desktop app or mobile app, and gives you an impressive amount of control, allowing you to install your own server – so you can be certain that your data is kept completely secure.
Riot is a user-friendly client for Matrix ( https://matrix.org), the decentralised network that also powers the WeeChat ( http://weechat.org) CLI chat client and Quaternion, a Qt/ QML-based client.
The range of features available for Matrix and its clients is too large to repeat here, but check out the blog at https://matrix.org/blog/posts. If you use Matrix or a client based on it, and you want to support it financially, check out the Matrix project’s Patreon ( https://patreon.com/matrixdotorg) and Librepay ( https://liberapay.com/ matrixdotorg) pages to find out how.
Ring ( https://ring.cx) is another communication platform that offers security and privacy controls and has recently come out of beta. It’s free and released under the GPLv3 licence, while using the OpenDHT protocol and a decentralised network. It offers an attractive and easy to use interface, which should hopefully persuade people that there are alternatives to Skype and Slack. It also includes some cool features not found elsewhere, such as the ability to make local calls between devices on a network that isn’t connected to the internet.
Another peer-to-peer communication tool that supports the right to privacy is Briar ( https://briarproject.org), which claims it is a “messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate”. It uses direct encrypted connections between users – rather than a centralised network – to keep messages private, and it uses the Tor network to sync.
The rise of these communication tools is heartening, especially in parts of the world where government intrusion is far more prevalent, but they aren’t perfect. Some of the projects have unfriendly or buggy interfaces and can be complicated to install and configure. But they’re improving, and it’s good to know the open source community is working to help keep us all secure.
Remember, wanting your conversations to remain private doesn’t mean you have anything to hide – it’s a right we all should have.
“There are a number of emerging projects that put the user’s privacy first”