Tox: the promising encrypted IM client that failed spectacularly overnight and was forgotten

What happened?

Discord replaced it?

Attached: tox-im-logo.jpg (300x300, 17K)

I don't know about TOX but all I know is that we need a FOSS alternative ASAP. It's ridiculous that 99% of online instant messaging is done via proprietary software.

matrix (riot)

>electron

Works on my machine.

Isn't Wire FOSS?

isn't Wire electron?

You expected a bunch of neets on Jow Forums who think their ricing skills can translate to programming to create a working software? Lmao.

>riot
Any particular reason for it? I want to stop using Discord as much as I can, but it needs to be a solid alternative, why not any other Matrix client?

There was no point in using it because it leaked your IP address to people you were talking to. The developers refused to listen to reason and kept it that way. Unsurprisingly, this meant nobody used it. If you just want encryption it's trivial to write a similar application with WebRTC. The problem is that most people that want security also want anonymity or plausible deniability.

>WebRTC
It leaks your real (as in, before the VPN) IP address.

Yeah, so does Tox. I was saying it would be trivial to write a Tox clone with WebRTC because WebRTC supports encryption but not IP address obfuscation, like Tox.

>>There was no point in using it because it leaked your IP address to people you were talking to.
Yeah pretty much this. There's no point in promoting an IM client here unless there's a central server involved to keep your IP from being shown to everybody you type to.

No, centralization isn't good either. It just needs native Tor or i2p support. As in, when you start the client it initiates a Tor or i2p connection and just werks enough for brainlets to use it. Similar to Tor Browser.

tox is a meme

So, Briar with desktop and calling support?

More or less, yeah. Also important is file sharing support because normalfags like to share their pictures.

I doubt briar will ever do all that. Signal will do just fine.

Which is also why Signal is more popular than Briar. Centralization is bad but if you're weighing the pros and cons of software usually people choose functionality over privacy, which is why Facebook and twitter are popular. If you want people to use a chat application it needs to work like they expect it to, which means not lacking features that already exist in their chat applications.

>failed

? ? ?

>your post
Lmao.

>it leaked your IP address to people you were talking to.
that's why it can use T O R if you're a pedo
if you want to talk with your friends/family you wouldn't care now would you

>It just needs native Tor or i2p support.
like the one it's had for ever?

>As in, when you start the client it initiates a Tor or i2p connection and just werks

sudo -u tor /usr/bin/tor
toxic -t -p 127.0.0.1 9050

would you like it to wipe your ass too

This happened

Attached: AbsoluteStateOfTox.jpg (1000x1000, 204K)

>a pony in equestria

Attached: 1534116395534.png (276x276, 50K)

That's not native support. It should connect automatically without user intervention like the Tor Browser. If you have to read a manual to use it then your software is never going to get normalfag support. And since most people need to speak to normalfags at some point, it means your software is going to die, like Tox did.

You can pretend that only pedos want anonymity all you want (why are you on Jow Forums?) but the fact is that lots of people want to be anonymous for various reasons. And because of that, Tox is dead.

>You can pretend that only pedos want anonymity all you want (why are you on Jow Forums?) but the fact is that lots of people want to be anonymous for various reasons. And because of that, Tox is dead.
so use T O R retard, that's what it's for

>That's not native support.
it IS native you fucking retard
>It should connect automatically
put it in a '''''script'''', put the script in your tox.desktop, HOW FUCKING RETARDED ARE YOU

>it IS native you fucking retard
No it's not. Get back to be when it's as easy to use as the Tor Browser.

>put it in a '''''script'''', put the script in your tox.desktop, HOW FUCKING RETARDED ARE YOU
If you have to read a manual to use it then your software is never going to get normalfag support. And since most people need to speak to normalfags at some point, it means your software is going to die, like Tox did.

>If you have to read a manual
I T. I S. RIGHT. THERE. IN. YOUR. CLIENTs. SETTINGS

Nope, don't see an option to automatically connect user, maybe you wasted your time writing and advocating shitware that nobody uses because you're too autistic to understand what people want.

>never going to get normalfag support.
good. fuck you and fuck normal fags, they suck
and good luck with moving their stupid asses from face berg

did we even gat past the logo?
I'm impressed...

I thought you gust would never get past that, let alone diffie-hellman

And that's why nobody uses Tox, turns out nobody wants to talk to people like you either.

>Nope, don't see an option to automatically connect user
maybe if you took the cock out of your faggot mouth you'd see it

Attached: poofter.png (830x497, 18K)

>faggot doesn't want to talk to me
poor me, how will i ever recover ;_;

audio video files and group a/v afaik

Try suicide.

Nope, still don't see it user.

Attached: 1506466886564.jpg (640x632, 53K)

what fuck do i give what ungrateful whiny shitty reddit people like you want

>Try suicide.
careful what you wish for

None, apparently, which is why you also can't be surprised Tox is dead and abandonware.

can somebody quickly describe the tox protocol to me?

is it p2p or does it have a server?
how do clients authenticate if p2p, public key crypto (ie RSA)?
after connection is stablished does it use symmetric crypto (AES?)

if so, how does the key exchange happen?


thanks

>it works
>it's dead
ok faggot, and why do you want to hide your ip so much, hmm? you give it to every site you visit anyway, could it be because you're a pedo?

> you give it to every site you visit anyway
Not if you use a VPN. Also, it's at least limited in scope to server operators. I wouldn't use any websites that gave my IP address to other users because I don't need any autistic faggots even knowing my general area through GeoIP. And there are zero women that would use an application like that because you'd probably stalk them.

money was stolen and tox didn't have mobile-desktop sync

terrible ui and key verification is a nightmare (you need to click literally hundreds of buttons when you add a new device to a small groupchat)

yes, and mostly good

yes

none of the other clients are complete. almost none support e2e encryption

signal becomes unusable with ~10 people in a groupchat (messages take forever to send)

vpn does jack for finger printing and again. u s e t o r
or like i said earlier, don't be a pedo and connect to strangers

I think you have just forgotten about. My client still gets updates and I still use it.

>vpn does jack for finger printing
No shit. VPNs are the first layer of many in establishing privacy on the Internet because web standards are shit. That doesn't mean that new applications should be just as shit. A program like Tox should take user privacy first and foremost. If you have to be careful who you connect to because they can tell where you live just by connecting then your program is fucking garbage.

tox does privacy as in privacy from a central agency, NOT the users
> If you have to be careful who you connect to because they can tell where you live just by connecting then your program is fucking garbage.
if you are a pedo and connect to random ppl you deserve to crash and burn in hell

Seems like quite an upstanding and moral community on tox. Can’t help but laugh at “chloe12” here, could this FBI agent be any more obvious?

>tox does privacy as in privacy from a central agency, NOT the users
Which makes it no different than any other shitty WebRTC chat application. This is why nobody uses it. It doesn't do anything that other "secure" chat applications don't already do, and is actually worse in terms of privacy than some of them. That's why Signal is still used and Tox isn't. But your autism makes it so you're literally incapable of understanding some people want things that you don't.

>if you are a pedo and connect to random ppl you deserve to crash and burn in hell
Stop assuming anyone that wants to be anonymous is a pedophile. I wouldn't want you knowing where I live either but we can still communicate right now because of anonymity.

This.

>tox does privacy as in privacy from a central agency, NOT the users
No, a central agency can tell that you've been chatting with someone via Tox, just not what you were talking about. That's enough to get a knock on your door, get questioned, or get arrested.

>That's enough to get a knock on your door, get questioned, or get arrested.
maybe in the land of the free™

>Which makes it no different than any other shitty WebRTC chat application
>It doesn't do anything that other "secure" chat applications don't already do,
ITS P2P you fucking retard

>I wouldn't want you knowing where I live
i wouldn't ever want to talk with you ever, why TF would i use tox then? again for the Nth time, your precious ip does not matter when you connect to friends and it's '''plug&play''' - you start it, paste an ID string and we talk, HOW MORE STRAIGHT FORWARD DO YOU WANT IT TO BE even retard like can do it

>i wouldn't ever want to talk with you ever
Not doing a very good job of that champ.

>HOW MORE STRAIGHT FORWARD DO YOU WANT IT TO BE even retard like can do it
I want it to take user privacy seriously, which it doesn't, so you can only connect to people you trust and know aren't compromised in some way. Which means I wont use it.

>ITS P2P you fucking retard
So is WebRTC.

>maybe in the land of the free™
In lots of areas of the world. Hell if you're a britbong they could report your IP to the morality police for a hate crime if you call them a nigger.

It's a peer-to-peer communication protocol. By design, it assumes that your conversational partner is somebody you've trusted and verified the identity of of, not somebody adversarial you need to hide your identity from. Its primary design objective was to prevent MITM attacks and compromise of conversation between two trusted partners by a third party, not protect your anonymity from the other end of the conversational pipe. Almost all other protocols that are purely peer to peer operate in the same way. Connections and conversations via Tor supported a long time ago to mitigate this.

In short, these talking points are misguided and uninformed and the people who cling to them are retards. Tox isn't even any good, but there's plenty of more complaints to levy against it than this retarded conflation of protecting your privacy and protecting your anonymity.

Attached: have fun tracing that cable anon.jpg (1958x1469, 671K)

>By design
Yes, it is shit by design.

>Its primary design objective was to prevent MITM attacks and compromise of conversation between two trusted partners by a third party, not protect your anonymity from the other end of the conversational pipe.
I am aware of that. I am explaining why people don't use it.

>Connections and conversations via Tor supported a long time ago to mitigate this.
Not in a simple enough way for normalfags to use. Tox should ship with Tor by default and automatically connect. Unfortunately, the developers are too shortsighted and let their application die because of their autism.

>but there's plenty of more complaints to levy against it than this retarded conflation of protecting your privacy and protecting your anonymity.
It may be shit in other ways, but if it's shit in a way that stops people from using it in favor of something else then no amount of your sugar coating will change that.

"Privacy" and "anonymity" are not the same thing. If I tell you that I want to have a "private" conversation with my doctor, that does not mean that I would like to converse with my doctor without him knowing who he is talking to. That would be an "anonymous" conversation. "Private" means that nobody but he and I knows that we spoke. If I use a courier to communicate with him, even in code, somebody knows that I'm talking to a doctor and that is a loss of privacy. That is anonymity AT THE EXPENSE of privacy. Direct peer to peer communication is the only way to have a completely private conversation.

Granted, your ISP can see what connections you're making, but at worst an encrypted peer to peer message is private in the same way that an encrypted phone call is private. With Tor, the privacy is near perfect.

Duplicating the effort of the Tor project when Tor already exists would have been a phenomenally bad decision. The result would not have stood any chance of working anywhere near as well as Tor works, to the detriment of the user. The obvious solution is a client with a button somewhere that says "use Tor", or even one that uses it by default, which would have been an extremely simple thing to do. The lack of such a thing at an early stage in development does not represent any kind of failure of the protocol, only that the need for it was seen as an edge case. To be clear, this is a job for a CLIENT, not the protocol. Anybody can make a client, so if there had been a demand for it, it would have been there.

For quite a long time before webmail became popular people used mail servers that were run by their local ISP, and that servers IP address would be in the header on all of their outgoing mail, revealing what city they lived in. Nobody ever tried to do anything about this because it simply does not matter even a little bit for the people you talk to to know what city you're in.

>The lack of such a thing at an early stage in development does not represent any kind of failure of the protocol, only that the need for it was seen as an edge case.
Yes, the developers were shortsighted and now their application is dead. Great job.

>Nobody ever tried to do anything about this because it simply does not matter even a little bit for the people you talk to to know what city you're in.
Lots of things were not done correctly in the 90s. That doesn't mean we should repeat them now.

>developers were shortsighted
Dozens of developers with different backgrounds and motivations disagreed with you unanimously, and of all the people making your argument, apparently not one of them had the skill to make a slight modification to a graphical front end and submit a pull request.

What's wrong with Tox other than the meme "whoever connects to you know your IP if you don't use Tor"?

I'm really impressed it has gotten this far. I was there when the usual "I'll start on the logo" shit was going on.

And clearly they were wrong because nobody uses Tox, which means all their hard work was wasted. Good job.

I use it.
Or would if I had any friends.

there is a "guide" book stored in a dht where your client looks for the destination

but once it gets the corresponding ip its just an encrypted chat between ips

>clearly
You could say exactly the same thing about any of the decisions that went into it.

"Clearly they were wrong not to make all of the clients hot pink, because nobody uses it."

The one thing does not follow logically from the other.

I can only tell you what I know has stopped myself and people I know from using it.

>What's wrong with Tox other than the meme "whoever connects to you know your IP if you don't use Tor"?
Its progress seems to have ground to a halt years ago.

>I'm really impressed it has gotten this far.
As far as I know it hasn't come very far in the last several years. It did get to the point where it basically worked, which is pretty impressive, but then it seemed to flop. There are only two clients available in Gentoo's main repo, and one of them is the ncurses one.

Oh, so it's actually dead. Shame. Why doesn't some other random Jow Forumsents fork and continue the work then?

>we need a FOSS alternative ASAP
Jabber
XMPP

Matrix.

call me when a foss equivalent can reach the good old skype let alone discord..

fosstards to realise that normies DONT care about being protected they want to do their job easy
if and when fosstards realise that you dont need to have a gazzilion of options to run a simple IM then we can talk

seems too easy to MITM attack...

do it pussy

Normies use the worst protocols and apps. The use the little chat window on desktop Facebook. They use snapchat and all kinds of trash apps. Matrix is mu h better.

No, the situation is worse for FOSS. Communication apps and social media are natural monopolies. People use what their friends use. That is established by large marketing budgets. See discord.

>Signal will do just fine.
Requires a phone number

no its because they made something simple to use
many came after the shitty skype changes none of them worked out
discord offered the same shit as the old skype on a modern ui and in a relatively small package

foss idiots cant do that becasuse they always think about only security and just fucking throw the rest on the trash can

Riot is the most complete client at the moment.
That got fixed a while ago, a lot of stuff has been streamlined

Centralization is fine if the encryption used is asymmetric like PGP, the devices only ever ping the server for messages

Okay Jow Forums
I'm going to be developing a secure IM application
over the next year
What would you as users want from it?
The target platform is Android but other clients will be created later if the application becomes used
I know encryption, steganography, support for onion routing, on-device storage encryption (for message history), randomized addresses that aren't tied to an account and are changed with every message on a per-chat basis, ability to hide conversations until you enter a secondary passcode for those situations where the cops ask you to show your phone and the app and unlock it for them, they won't know they're not seeing all they're seeing

Just fork Tox. Save some work.

Nah it's for a final year project for my CS degree, and i don't really want to fork Tox, i don't need everything from it and frankly i want the app to be used by normies when buying weed or whatever

Help Matrix development?

Whatsapp, Viber, Telegram, Discord. Maybe Signal for some.
It was an obscurity to begin with.

Yes but it's shit. Depends on Google for message delivery on android and the desktop UI is garbage and hasn't been fixed in years.

>how does the key exchange happen?
Pic related.

Anonymity is a part of privacy.

Pic related

Attached: Tox issues.png (700x2033, 80K)

"no?" that's all you have?
The reason discord was successful was the massive, well targeted marketing. Streamers and such were paid to shill it, but also to create their own chatrooms. This is clever because you then have someone they want to talk to on discord, they go in the chat room and there's memes and girls.

People know how to download a app and fill in their email. That's all you need to do to use riot(matrix) . Same for slack actually, which both discord and roit ripped off.

What matters the most is what people use. Without people, messaging is useless, and when everyone already are on Fb messenger, tox is useless.

Just accept the fact that the mainstream will always pick what is most convenient and fashionable.

If we want to "win" we need to stop advertising the way we ate and start pandering to the mainstream. Normalfags dont give a shit about privacy, they care about what all of their friends are on.

This is why nobody used Tox though

it has to be my own thing unfortunately, and i'm far too inexperienced in contributing to projects anyway

webrtc is server

>In lots of areas of the world. Hell if you're a britbong they could report your IP to the morality police for a hate crime if you call them a nigger
wtf has that to do with tox

you got it nigger

nobody even knows it exists, same as gnu and linux, normalfags neither know or care, those that do, know

>The reason discord was successful was the massive, well targeted marketing. Streamers and such were paid to shill it

not really discord became popular on the lineage 2 community well before any shilling had begin
at around mid 16 every major private server be it on l2 or minecraft already had a discord channel instead of ventrillo or ts

streamers came way after that

>same as gnu and linux
lol @ trying to equate the two

Electron.

Explain in excruciating detail how electron has anything to do with the Matrix protocol.

>normalfags care about tor
What do you shill, Shlomo?

literally no one knows about them, AT MOST they know android

You have a weird image of normies. Tell me more about them.

they love windows and get pissy if you tell them something like 'read the eula '

lol

they can, but their depresison wont let them be productive

No one here said the real reason. Tox died because most of the devs were harassed by a psychopathic autist who the Tox devs rejected. Money being stolen from the Tox foundation was the icing on the cake. Here is the resume from the crazy autist called neeh.

1/2

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