Your first OTR text chat with Jitsi
Channel: APrivateLifeOnline
Date: 2012-09-01

How to use Jitsi to text chat with your friends using Off The Record (OTR) technology, that gives you encryption, authentication, deniability and perfect forward secrecy.

We show you how to verify the OTR fingerprints of your friends, to ensure nobody is impersonating them.

This example uses Google accounts (you've already got one if you use Gmail, Google Talk or any other Google product), but you can also use your Facebook account, or a Yahoo! account, or MSN, ICQ, Jabber... (Not Skype - they don't allow 3rd party software to use their network.)

The beauty of using Jitsi instead of the native Google/Facebook/other chat software is that it allows you to keep your existing network of online friends, but it adds a strong layer of privacy, stopping all intermediaries from snooping on your conversations. It's the only way to chat with people via Google, without Google knowing what you said. It's the only way to stop Facebook recording your chats with your Facebook friends.

This is useful for journalists who want to protect their sources, activists, whistleblowers and anyone who doesn't like their every word to their friends being recorded by governments and corporations alike.

"Off The Record" means that text chatting with this technology is like casually chatting with your friends face to face. Nobody is keeping notes. A rare luxury for today's Internet.

For more information check out http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/ and https://jitsi.org/index.php/Main/Features

Please note that Google Chat's "Go off the record" feature is simply a misleading misnomer and not to be confused with OTR. Google's "Go off the record" means: "Do not display this conversation in the user's chat history". There is no promise whatsoever that Google is not recording and analyzing what you type, storing it forever and selling or providing this information to 3rd parties. For background, see https://apapadop.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/stop-google-recording-your-chats/

The Cypherpunks Off The Record (OTR) protocol (as implemented in this video with Jitsi) is the best we currently have for true online communications privacy.