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This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life And Help Overthrow Your Government (Wired)

Posted Jul 29, 2012 16:13 UTC (Sun) by xxiao (subscriber, #9631)
In reply to: This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life And Help Overthrow Your Government (Wired) by Kit
Parent article: This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life And Help Overthrow Your Government (Wired)

OTR is not that easy to use esp you need the peer to set up the same thing.
cryptocat can be really useful when you need chat privately from an internet bar, a kiosk, a computer in hotel,etc

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Posted Jul 30, 2012 4:32 UTC (Mon) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

The few times I've bothered to use OTR, it was incredibly easy to setup (no more difficult than any program). I'd imagine, though, it'd depend hugely on which client you used it with (I'm sure some are absolute nightmares).

> chat privately from an internet bar, a kiosk, a computer in hotel,etc

Exactly who are you wanting privacy from?

If it's the owner (or anyone else that can touch them) of each of those machines, you can simply forget about that to begin with, as a keylogger would easily defeat Cryptocat (and OTR, and everything else that didn't encrypt the data before it entered the computer). For any casual malicious entities on the network (i.e. anyone that can't hijack SSL sessions... so basically anyone that isn't approaching the power of a nation state), then the SSL certificate alone would do a good enough job securing the communication (and many common chat protocols support SSL connections... even IRC!). If you're worried about someone that can hijack SSL sessions, then you're screwed anyways if you're using the website version, which is almost assuredly the version you'd be using on one of those machines.

I'm not really seeing a scenario where Cryptocat actually delivers on the hype.

This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life And Help Overthrow Your Government (Wired)

Posted Jul 30, 2012 8:59 UTC (Mon) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

"cryptocat can be really useful when you need chat privately from an internet bar, a kiosk, a computer in hotel,etc"

When was the last time you were able to set up Tor on a machine in an internet bar, a kiosk, or a computer in hotel?

Because from what I'm hearing, the only time cryptocat is actually secure (any more secure than plain old SSL) is when it's being used through Tor.

This Cute Chat Site Could Save Your Life And Help Overthrow Your Government (Wired)

Posted Jul 30, 2012 15:35 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Forget that, an internet bar, kiosk or hotel computer probably has a keylogger on it, either installed by the system owner or by nefarious types. It's not safe to type anything personally identifying, login to any of your services, etc. from this kind of terminal.