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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

I think it's too late for it and this wouldn't solve that many problems:

- public xmpp servers are shutting down one after the other

- xmpp ties your identity to the server you register with, when there's technology to tie your identity to a cryptographic hash (you can use DHT to find people)

- servers are not optional in xmpp, when in reality most of the time when you message people they're also online, so peer2peer would be fine there (especially for server outages like the server I used frequently had)

- One usecase where you need servers is to save power on mobile devices. XMPP doesn't support push notification

- end-to-end encryption is an total afterthought in xmpp

- basic things like sending pictures, voice or videochat never work

- xmpp is an laughably over complex standard created by a committee

- pgp is totally unusable for normal users

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I'll agree with most of those but the re: the last point I'll throw out a half-hearted nay-say and reply with "sort of". The guys at keybase.io is trying real hard to let "Johnny have crypto" + https://www.mailpile.is/ makes it pretty easy for a Mac user to enable GPG and Gmail. My concern is primarily user-adoption - i.e., Johnny doesn't know why he needs crypto, even after Snowden. The NSA et al are counting on that apathetic attitude to make their jobs easier. Out of the box Mailpile is a easy stop-gap solution while more appropriate ones come out.

You're totally right re: DHT and cryptohashes for identification being a fairly ideal solution. PeerJS/WebRTC (part of HTML5 -- supported by Chrome and Firefox) support NAT-busting and are fairly secure. I'm slowly piecing together a comm-project addressing the larger issue because I'm tired of being complacent, with the intention of funding it eventually off of Exchange add-ins dual-licensed as open as I can while ensuring organizations above the size of 250 employees have to pay licensing fees.

That being said, what protocol isn't over-complex which has worked out well? Either you have things like SMTP which are just spec'd out by one or two dudes and submitted as an RFC where tons of stones were left unturned (leaving such a mess w/r/t maildir vs mbox not to mention the whole end-user problem of authentication, if you remember the sysadmin hell of trying to configure pop-before-smtp and a bunch of other problems during the late 90s, my god, it was horrid) -- or you have an over-spec Java2EE situation where everything is over-specified to an insane degree that implementations take teams and teams to get full compliance.

I ask this sincerely, with no snark - what protocol should one build crypto into?

> xmpp ties your identity to the server you register with, when there's technology to tie your identity to a cryptographic hash (you can use DHT to find people)

I have to disagree on this. XMPP follows the same model as email, where your identity is tied to a domain name, and I think it is about as good model as possible in our current internet. The key is that you really really should have your own domain, which then allows you to switch service providers at will without disrupting your identity. Of course I admit that it is bit idealistic viewpoint.

>- public xmpp servers are shutting down one after the other

How fast and what is your source for this? There are 146 public Jabber servers listed on IM Observatory right at the moment:

* https://www.xmpp.net/directory.php

I've personally never used a public Jabber server because I want my Jabber ID to refer to my domain.

Thanks for sharing. There are some good arguments here,* particularly re: servers holding your registration info and some of the downsides of requiring servers for xmpp (though it also has some advantages—it's nice to be able to message someone not online).

*though I'm always a little anti-"pgp can't be used by normal users." If the situation requires the security that PGP provides, users can frequently be made to learn. (That being said, Glenn Greenwald couldn't be bothered to set up PGP to talk to Snowden until someone got him up to speed. [0])

[0]: https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret...

> though it also has some advantages—it's nice to be able to message someone not online

Just because you don't require servers, doesn't mean that you can't have servers optionally as a relay. Your client tell would tell the clients of your contacts to send messages to a server specified by you when they can't reach you directly. For instance the server could be run by the company behind the messaging app you're using and could send you push notifications. You could still switch the server at will without loosing your identity.

Given these points, what protocol(s) do you think is the best candidate for development?

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