BitTorrent is building a secure messaging client

BitTorrent, the company that developed the peer-to-peer data transfer protocol, is building a server-less messaging client. It will provide users with greater security for their online communications, making them harder to intercept by governments and criminals.

BitTorrent Chat is based on distributed encrypted peer-to-peer network technology where there is no central control, storage and forwarding server that can be compromised or captured for access to user data. It’s messages are never stored on a server, meaning they’re safe from data breaches. BitTorrent plans to keep the client free and without limits as to how many messages you can send.

There’s no central server that stores communications, although it apparently works “similar to BitTorrent Sync, but adapted for real-time communications,” said BitTorrent’s communications chief Christian Averill.

The BitTorrent Chat is currently in alpha stages of development, and BitTorrent invites all interested parties to sign up and help the project through feedback, ideas and testing. Eventually, the service is expected to work with other instant-messaging accounts and be interoperable with SIP standards, but for now it requires a BitTorrent account. BitTorrent hasn’t specified which desktop platforms the chat client will be available on.

The motivation behind the project is, according to BitTorrent, increasing the security and privacy of your online conversations. “This year alone, more than 6 million people have been impacted by data breaches. The right to own your own conversations online: it’s not a given. It should be,” says BitTorrent in a blog post. The company said the aim behind BitTorrent Chat was to ensure people’s messages stayed under their control, “private, secure and free”.

In July, The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde also announced his new project: naming it Heml.is, a crowdfunded, mobile messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption to keep your conversations safe.

via Blogger http://wetechgeeks.blogspot.com/2013/10/bittorrent-is-building-secure-messaging.html