Off-the-Record Messaging
So, in my switch from Fire to Adium which went completely without pain, as it turns out, I have discovered something really great. Adium has Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) built right in. This is an encryption package that makes having encrypted IM sessions really easy as long as both parties support OTR.
A lot of people say that encryption isn’t necessary if you don’t have anything to hide, but there’s all sorts of reasons especially in this age of incredibly easy eavesdropping to do it - especially if it takes 0 effort to do. The question really is, why wouldn’t you do it?
It seems that more IM clients for all the platforms are picking up on this, Adium of course does, but so does Pidgin (and gaim) and Trillian, too. They are even working on an OTR AIM proxy that you could run and point any client to and thus become OTR friendly even if your particular client does not support it - this is still in the early stages. Hopefully this becomes a standard so that interoperability between all IM’ers just happens.
Anyhow to turn it on (in Adium) go to:
File -> [connect/disconnect an account] -> Edit Account
Then click on “Privacy” and set the Encryption to: “Encrypt chats automatically”. What that will do is it will make Adium try to encrypt every conversation you have but if the person you are IM’ing doesn’t support OTR it defaults to plain text. So, once that’s set if conversation can be encrypted it will be and if it can’t it won’t be - all this behind the scenes, you don’t have to do anything else.
There’s all sorts of interesting other tidbits about why OTR is so cool, reasons of authentication and perfect forward secrecy, etc… you can read that on their site if you are interested in the technical/cryptographic details (I highly recommend it, it’s interesting stuff) but more than that, I recommend you turn this feature on by default.
And I thought that the cypherpunk movement was dead. Oh how little I know and how wrong I could be what with them coming up with this so awesome package. Get with the Adium (or the Pidgin or the Trillian) and get on the bandwagon.
