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Tor Messenger Beta is now available

If you are still using Instant messengers for communication -- that's so last century by the way -- then you may be interested in the first public release of Tor Messenger Beta, an instant messaging client based on Instantbird but enhanced with the power of Tor.

Tor Messenger is a cross-platform chat application that is based on Instantbird (just like Tor Browser itself is based on Firefox).

Unlike Instantbird however, all traffic is routed automatically through the Tor network which is the main distinguishing feature.

The functionality of the messaging client remains the same which means that you can use it to connect to a variety of transport networks including Facebook Chat, Google Talk, IRC or Jabber.

It should be clear that some communication, metadata especially, can still be logged depending on the service you are using.

tor messenger

If you are using Facebook Chat for instance, you need to sign in to a Facebook account to make use of it. What Facebook cannot log however is the location you are connecting to the Internet from as your original location is hidden as your connection is routed through Tor's network.

Note: A bug in the Windows version of Tor Messenger is preventing the app from starting up correctly. There is a workaround for that though:

  1. Open the prefs.js file in Messenger/TorMessenger/Data/Browser/profile.default/
  2. Add the following two lines to the end of it
  3. user_pref("gfx.direct2d.disabled", true);
  4. user_pref("layers.acceleration.disabled", true);
  5. Comment out any line starting with gfx.driver-init by adding // in front of each line
  6. Start Tor Messenger.

If you have worked with Instantbird before you will find yourself at home right away once you get the application to start up.

One difference is that unencrypted one-to-one conversations are not allowed. This means that you won't be able to communicate with other users if they don't use an OTR-enabled client. There is an option in the preferences to allow unencrypted communication.

The main focus is security, robustness of the client and the user experience. The team plans to introduce new features to the messaging app in the future that improves it significantly.

Among the improvements are sandboxing support, support for secure multi-party communication, encrypted file-transfers, and improved Tor support.

Users who run the beta version are asked to report requests, bugs and provide feedback to the team.

Tor Messenger Beta is provided as a build for Linux, Windows and OS X. You find download links and checksum information on the official Tor blog.

 

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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