(credit: Samuel Huron)
On Thursday, the Tor Project released its first public beta of Tor Messenger, an easy-to-use, unified chat app that has security and cryptography baked in. If you care about digital security, you should ditch whatever chat program you're using and switch to it right now.
The app is specifically designed to protect location and routing information (by using Tor) and chat data in transit (by using the open source Off-The-Record, or OTR, protocol). For anyone who has used a similar app (like Pidgin or Adium), Tor Messenger’s interface will be fairly self-explanatory, but there are two notable quirks.
First, by default, it will not allow you to send messages to someone who doesn’t support OTR—but there is an option to disable that feature. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Second, unlike Pidgin or Adium, Tor Messenger cannot log chats, which is handy if you’re privacy-minded.