RetroShare: secure communications with friends

Hi HN,

I'm part of the Retroshare-dev team. We'd be interested in hearing any feedback / questions you have.

We have an very active community, especially in France and Germany that uses Retroshare daily. Development effort is continuing at a rapid rate. The existing release is a little out of date, but we expect to have a new stable release out before the end of February.

You can get status updates via twitter: @retroshare

drBob.

Reminds me of WASTE:

http://waste.sourceforge.net/

Would really like to play with this, but when I run it on Ubuntu it bombs out, leaving this on the CLI:

  SSL Library Init!
  AuthGPGimpl::VerifySignature() FAILED
  AuthSSLimpl::AuthX509() X509 NOT authenticated
  AuthSSLimpl::InitAuth() validateOwnCertificate() Failed

EDIT: It works if I don't use my existing GnuPG keypair. Suspect it's bombing out because I removed the master key from the keyring leaving only the subkeys. Will do some more testing and bring it up in the forums.

EDIT2: Works fine on a brand new keypair. As soon as I add an additional signing subkey, delete ~/.retroshare/ and try again it bombs out. If I then delete ~/.retroshare/ again, and then remove the signing subkey, it starts working once again.

@RetroShare users: Can we setup a hacker news community like thar on Google Plus [0] there? That might kick up adoption.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452912

Also worth a mention:

http://www.oneswarm.org/

http://www.alliancep2p.com/

I tried to setup the nogui version some time back. Couldn't figure out how to, and the documentation is really scarce. Had no luck on the forums either.

Paperwise, the technology seems solid. The only piece of advice to keep in mind is to not approve keys you don't trust.

I installed it on Windows, but it complained about the wrong version of GNUPG and didn't run. (I have 2.something for Engigmail installed.) Is there a way to install both of those at the same time?

I use retroshare all the time as a desktop app, and in a browser. Still a bit of work to be done, but is my favourite way to do encrypted chat, with my GPG key, and has other cool features.

Alternative RetroShare client (Addon) is found here:

http://interface.sf.net

Seems nice, but not terribly stable, i.e segfault after giving my connection details

offtopic: I love how with Github I can get to the source in just a few clicks. Its still a scavenger hunt with sourceforge.