Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger
Found on The Daily Dot on Saturday, 01 March 2014
Tor, the team behind the world’s leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland.
Over the long term, TIMB will likely become the messenger of choice for Tor users. Software such as TorChat and BitMessage already have significant userbases and smart advocates, but with the full weight of the Tor Launcher and team behind it, there’s little reason to imagine TIMB won’t succeed.
Secure communication is essential these days; the recent leak about the spying on Yahoo users by GCHQ is just another reason. Of course politicians will say that this only makes it harder to track down terrorists, child molesters, druglords and whatever else you can imagine; it should be obvious though that those who are part of the organized crime have secure ways for communication and the wide spread adoption of strong encrytion won't change much. In the end, the development of such systems speeds up because people are sick of being monitored, be it by WhatsApp or the NSA et al.