DeltaTouch, a community created client for Ubuntu Touch | Hacker News Reader

DeltaTouch, a community created client for Ubuntu Touch

delta.chat

42 pointsnafnlj17 comments

I wasn't familiar with Delta Chat.

"Delta Chat is a new chat app that sends messages via e-mails, encrypted if possible, with Autocrypt." [1]

[1]:https://delta.chat/en/help#what-is-delta-chat

I wasn’t aware of Autocrypt before this, and its description on Wikipedia is not confidence inspiring[1]:

“Key exchange is during the initial handshake and valid or invalid keys of peers may be replaced anytime later without any user interaction or verification. This makes it very easy to exchange new key(s) if a user loses access to the key but also makes the protocol much more susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks than clean TOFU.”

This is almost the exact opposite of the properties you’d normally expect in an attempt to provide encrypted emails, and offers neither recoverability nor even detectability for the legitimate parties.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocrypt

ftr, Delta Chat implements not only Autocrypt but also "Counter MITM" to protect against active attacks, see https://countermitm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Which active attacks? This is a large document; from a quick look, it doesn't explain whether it adds pre-shared key agreement, whether it's just pinning a TOFU'd key, or whether it's doing something entirely different.

@dang might want to change the title for us confused souls

This is a very beautiful study case for open source projects - someone needed a client for the niche OS (sorry Ubuntu Touch), so they just wrote it. It seems like they've done so without much prior experience.

As for Delta Chat - I've tried using it previously and I have a vague memory it messed up my inbox a little. Is there a simple way to separate the chats from my normal emails? I don't want to have a new email in Thunderbird for every instant message I get. Is there a solution to that?

Can you create a category just for Delta Chat messages? I've never used Delta Chat but in Gmail you can create categories and tabs so I would be able to create a category just for Delta Chat messages. Is there some sort of thing like that in Thunderbird or whatever email provider you use?

I use Delta Chat as my primary IM platform to talk to my wife, friends, and family. It's really a great application and WebXDC is super neat!

I value it so highly that it's one of only three monthly monetary FOSS donations I make.

Does your wife, and do your friends and family all use Delta Chat to chat with you or their own mail clients?

They all use Delta Chat. I self-hosted a non-federated Matrix server for ~3 years, but once I found Delta Chat (a little over a year ago) I asked everyone to transition over to using it to stay in contact with me. About 15 people in total, I haven't heard any complaints and it works great.

possible to interact between normal emails and the app https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/8LbrGXKZN70

WebXDC sounds fun, could you tell more about the use-cases you found?

Mostly games! Porting any FOSS web game that has a score mechanic or can be made asynchronous to WebXDC is straightforward and fun.

There are a few utility apps like TODO and Calendar that we use too.

Isn’t this that email chat app? It messed up my mailbox. Never again.

Though the UX seemed quite fantastic (at least on iOS; iirc).

depending on usage scenarios, a dedicated account might be the better option for Delta Chat. mixed usage might get tricky, even though Delta Chat tries to sort "chat messages" to a special folder

Delta touch is the Doom runner app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opentouchg...

I thought that this was the Doom client

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