[TriLUG] question about ytalk

[Justis Peters]

The OTR protocol is available on a significant number of IM clients:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Client_support

OTR is a great solution in many cases, because you can continue to use 
existing infrastructure, such as Jabber, Google Talk, or Yahoo IM, with 
confidence that even the servers can't read your messages. There are 
downsides, such as the requirement that your contacts need to also run a 
client that supports it before you can make use of it.

For those who are using OTR for privacy reasons, it's important to note 
that nothing stops the client software from logging the decrypted 
contents of the conversation. Sure, the servers in the middle can only 
log the encrypted version, but there might be a decrypted version on the 
recipient's hard drive. This may or may not be desired, but you should 
be aware of it.

To Warren specifically: You may consider running a server for one of 
these locally, and using that to keep your conversations alive. They all 
do "chat room" style interfaces:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmpp
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

I recognize that might be overkill, but it then gives you all sorts of 
options on clients, logging, and long-lived chat sessions.

Kind regards,
Justis

Warren Myers wrote:
> I use Adium with that feature, but the other user has to use the same IM
> client for the OTR functionality to work.
>
> -Warren
>
> On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 11:52, Kevin Hunter <hunteke at earlham.edu> wrote:
>
>   
>> At 9:13am -0400 Fri, 20 Aug 2010, Warren Myers wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> There are times when we want to talk about personal projects and
>>> prefer the contents to not be captured in AIM/Gchat histories.
>>>
>>>       
>> Perhaps tangential to your specific request for ytalk, but I seem to recall
>> someone touting Pidgin and the OTR (Off-the-Record) plugin for this or a
>> similar use case.  I haven't yet had a need/desire to use it myself, so I
>> don't know if OTR saves the conversation history.  To me, at least, the
>> whole concept of OTR would imply not.
>>
>> Any OTR users have an insight to share?
>>
>>