Cryptocat Creates a Private, Encrypted Chatroom on Any Computer with a Web Browser. Probably most useful when someone doesn’t have Skype? Of course, as with anything, the host system is the weakest link. Skype is great because it’s peer-to-peer and doesn’t go through a centralized host. The service says that messages are encrypted on your own computer before leaving it, and everything’s wiped after 30 minutes.
The system is pretty easy to use. You put in a room, then you put in your name. On the following window, at the bottom, you need to type in a key where it says “type a key here.” It will judge the key for its strength.
This will likely be most useful for criminal, piracy and hacking networks. It could be useful for others, possibly (e.g. protestors). The simplest countermeasure is to block the URL. It would be more useful to a variety of networks if they open-sourced the technology so anyone could reproduce it on any domain. It’s “beta software” so who knows what will happen with it, long-term.
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Cryptocat has a link at the bottom of the active screen area, beside “twitter” which says “github.” That will take you to github where you can download the source code. It’s not truly open source in the sense of collaborating and contributing to nightly builds, but you can look at the code and make suggestions. In fact, on their github page, they say, “code review highly appreciated.”
Thanks for pointing that out Christopher! That will be useful I am sure.