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AnonTechie writes "The Tor Foundation is moving forward with a plan to provide its own instant messaging service called the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle". The tool will allow people to communicate in real time while preserving anonymity by using chat servers concealed within Tor's hidden network. In planning since last July as news of the National Security Agency's broad surveillance of instant messaging traffic emerged the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) should be available in experimental builds by the end of March, based on a roadmap published in conjunction with the Tor Project's Winter Dev meeting in Iceland.
TIMB will connect to instant messaging servers configured as Tor "hidden services" as well as to commercial IM services on the open Internet."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02 2014, @08:28PM
why in gods name does everything have to go through a 3d party? ... well tor provides so called onion domains. .. again.
email? you need gmail, hotmail, ymail?
file storage? you need dropbox?
IM? you need to connect to a server first.
need a unique name (domain)? get ready to be fleeced?
BUT!
you have internet.
your friend has internet.
connect directly already.
as for "resource location"
problem solved.
anything using tor and NOT going direct is again somebody who is trying
to get in the way
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:35PM
Most people don't have their computer running 24/7. But if you're sending mail, then the receiving computer must be running in the next few days, or the mail delivery fails. Therefore there are mail servers: Computers which are running 24/7, and where the sender can sent the mail whenever he wants, and the receiver can download it whenever he wants.
Dropbox is not about file storage, but about file distribution. It basically serves the same purpose as a mail server: As a sort of buffer between the sending and the receiving computer. Of course you could also use mail for the same purpose; dropbox just makes it easier.
Anyway, if you are using Tor, it also goes through a third party. Several of them, indeed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:41PM
A slight correction: The "in the next few days" only applies if you use the relay functionality of SMTP, which also needs third-party servers. If you want to really pass the mail directly to the recipient, the recipient's computer must be running at the exact time when the mail is sent.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by monster on Monday March 03 2014, @09:02AM
A slight correction over the correction: Non-instant delivery of SMTP doesn't require third party servers, it just requires both computers to be online at the same time when a retry occurs, not when the mail is sent.
(Score: 1) by NovelUserName on Sunday March 02 2014, @11:18PM
My understanding is that the middleman problem is to deal with the non-static IP problem. If every user has a static IP, then great, you can connect directly, otherwise you will need some method of identifying the current ip of the person you want to talk to. The traditional solution is to have both parties connect to a server, which then assigns connections based on their login credentials. I suppose you could have the server just pass the correct IP to each party, thus facilitating a direct connection, however, a record of the communication still exists. I suppose you could have each party periodically download a full list of the current IP addresses known to the server, thus obscuring the specific connection made to everyone except the ISP. This, however, seems data intensive, and since most people care more about their bandwidth cap than privacy, you and I aren't going to get a solution like that.
(Score: 1) by monster on Monday March 03 2014, @09:06AM
That is precisely what DNS is for. Too bad so many PCs on dynamic IP connections are infected with SPAM-sending trojans that most big email providers require also inverse DNS to accept email from those IPs, which is a lot harder to get (you need to convince your ISP to set it for you, and update it whenever your IP changes).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 03 2014, @02:34AM
One word: IPv6. The limitations in the 32-bit address space of IPv4 ensure that the Internet continues to be divided into those who have a publicly routable static IP address, and those who can only be clients because their IP keeps changing, or worse yet, live behind one or more NATs. All of this goes away with IPv6, and it really is the only way to go forward.