The Onion Router (TOR) was designed to help against network surveillance by utilizing a network of secure tunnels. Tor is used by individuals to access blocked websites and communicate freely on the Internet by routing the connection through a series of secure tunnels where each tunnel only knows the previous and next in line.
Torchat utilizes the power of the Tor network to create a peer to peer instant messaging system, effectively a secure anonymous and encrypted instant messenger that runs right of the box. The software program is fully portable and can be run from external drives or local hard drives.
One limitation of the current version is that the listening port cannot be changed unless the user is doing it in the source which would mean that it would have to be compiled again. The author promised to add a configuration option to change the listening port of the application in a later version.
Once started the user is greeted with a window similar to the one on the above screenshot with the difference that no other contacts are added obviously. To add users one needs their Torchat ID which is a series of random chars, a nickname to identify the person and a initial message. The easiest way to exchange these would be by email, website, phone or other Instant Messengers. Paranoids will probably exchange them during a real-life meeting.
The author has some plans for his Instant Messenger. He plans multi-user chats, file transfers, customization options and block lists among other things. One to look out for.
Related posts:
Aardvark Combines Yahoo Answers With Instant MessagingEncrypt Instant Messaging with Pidgin Encryption
MessenPass Recover Lost Instant Messenger Passwords
How do you use instant messaging?
My Encrypted Tunnel
Retroshare secure Instant Messenger
Run Multiple MSN Messenger Instances
Instantbird a Mozilla based Instant Messenger
It’s not like – a really smart idea – to write the location beside the tornicks :))
Keule the user who is running the app is selecting the names.
martin, do you follow the forum at portablefreeware.com? if not, it’s a huge coincidence that i just posted this over there today :)
this is cross-platform by the way…
I’m subscribed to their RSS News Feed. The name of the guy who mentioned it sounded fairly familiar ;)
Oh why didn’t they just name themselves TOR Orion Router? tsk..