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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting for Google to implement OTR and ZRTP in Hangouts by default...especially now after all this.

Have a good time waiting, sir. In the meanwhile you might be interested in the following fact:

1. Google is removing XMPP as protocol http://www.zdnet.com/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-me...

2. On the other hand, however, duckduck is giving us some alternatives https://duck.co/topic/duckduckgo-s-new-public-xmpp-jabber-se...

Forget about DuckDuckGo, it's based in the US. Better use Startpage.com, which is based in the Netherlands.

And you don't think the EU isn't already doing pretty much the same thing?

It's not the fact that US=bad, EU=good. The fact is that you can use free software programs over xmpp which support OTR cryptography.

Why use Google Chat at all when there're a lot of 3rd party community-run jabber servers available? Then you can use any client you want and get a level of protection you desire (including OTR).

Probably not gonna happened, but it would solve so many problems with public key crypto. Key distribution? No problem, tie your public key to your gmail account. Need to communicate with someone? Just send them your public key. Goole would verify that key X belongs to mail Y, another problem solved. Mix it together with some javascript library (source code available by design) and you have almost perfect and simple to use public key crypto for masses. Oh well time to wake up….

Both Google and Facebook are in excellent position to actually bring public key crypto to the masses in a usable, it-just-works, kind of way. But of course both have every incentive not to do it.

Also, they can't. Be. Trusted.

Except for the minor issue that, in the context of PRISM, the NSA mostly collects metadata - who corresponded with who, when and how much.

Public key cryptography is great for this, because it means if you match one person to a key, you've then reliably matched every message they sent and have fairly strong proof it's the same person.

I thought Google were being fingered as complicit? I wouldn't trust them, even if they totally super-secret pinky promise they're not handing everything over, honest!

Still requires you to trust the holder of your private key....

Why would Google do that? They are cooperating (regardless of their public statements) with the NSA to spy on us. I for one don't trust the lies.

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