Hacker News Reader

Comment by chinathrow | Hacker News Reader

That is awesome - now we also need to kill metadata collection. Is this feasible?

Oh and off-the-record was there on Hangouts/Gtalk before - I used it but the chats were replicated across clients (e.g. Pidgin vs gmail.com) - so not really off-the-record (i.e. they lied).

View on HN

Metadata-free chat exists already on the desktop with Ricochet (https://ricochet.im) and it will soon exist on mobile with Briar (https://briarproject.org). Both work through Tor hidden services - Briar also allows to exchange messages over Bluetooth and direct wifi.

It's "Off The Record" in that they claimed not to store history. As I understand this is completely unrelated to the OTR encryption system.

I got rate limited so here's my late reply:

Yes, I labelled that incorrectly and I was not talking about the OTR encryption tech - Google still lied though in terms that they kept a conversation record and replicated it live and time-delayed across channels.

"Off The Record" is a technical term to describe a cryptographic scheme for allowing deniable authentication (meaning that only the two parties involved in a communication can be sure the other sent a message - they cannot prove to anyone else that the other person sent them a particular message). The Signal protocol is based off a similar system (Axolotl) which provides similar guarantees.

It has nothing to do with "off the record" check boxes in some UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com