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Pidgin (or any other libpurple-based client, like Adium) with the purple-hangouts plugin works fine for my requirements.

I will have to check that, but I'm using Adium (for Mac OS X). It's also relying on libpurple, so I hope it will work.
By the way, the submitter is uninformed, Facebook Chat API (using OAuth) stopped working weeks ago. But it seems login/password XMPP was still working. I meant to do just that, but I guess it's too late now :)

We've seen censorship before, with chat providers blocking certain words, replacing key letters with asterisks or simply substituting inoffensive words for those considered 'problematic.' That's not what Valve is doing here though - the entire message is disappearing, not just the troublesome domain.

Microsoft was doing something similar back in 2007. samzenpus seems to have a short memory :/

Firefox Hello bundles this kind of thing right into the web browser. I kind of like this idea for allowing basic functionality (think of the browser-based IM in Google and Facebook) and even extending that to voice and video (the way Google Hangouts does), but I'd ideally like to see a more powerful stand-alone client for people that want more than just a few casual conversations here and there. (This is an even better idea for Thunderbird, since your contact list lives there.)

Fortunately, we have pidgin, a stand-alone IM client with a great feature set and wonderful cross-platform support (Adium is merely an OS X implementation of Pidgin). Pidgin desperately needs help, as it hasn't successfully had an easy-to-use voice (let alone video) capability. I'm hoping that WebRTC (which powers Firefox Hello and, I think, Google Hangouts) can provide this, at least for using Firefox Hello and/or bridging between two Pidgin/Adium/Libpurple users.

Why not develop and use technology that protects political engagement and democratic paricipation?

You mean, like modern-day cryptography ?

Specially things like OTR ?
That have perfect foward secrecy, thanks to DHE ? (i.e.: there's no key that could be disclosed to enable decryption of past intercepted communication) ?
That use authentication through Socialist Millionaire (which is keyless, meaning that there's no way to proof that past intercepted communication is authentic) ?
Which simply functions as an overlay, meaning that you can use it as up today above any chat system that you currently already have (Google Talk for example, huh no sorry "Google+ Hangouts" is the name now) so you don't need to sign-up a new chat and ask all your contacts to move to a new service?
Which already available out-of-the-box in a big number of software (like jitsi, adium) or as a plugin in others (like pidgin) ?

And there are numerous other technologies for also protecting e-mail (GPG is an often mentioned example), for protecting voice/video communication (the above mentioned jitsi implements them too), etc.

The tools are there. Some have very easy forms. You just need to get the users used to them.

Add this as reason #2'175 on the long list of why one should definitely use end-to-end encryption.

If you use a well designed end-to-end encryption, that has been validated by cryptologist (think OTR for chat, ZRTP for voice), I doesn't matter what the quality of the underlying link is or if telcos are helping breaking the link.

Best part? These technology can work over your already existing systems (though ZRTP can't work over Skype's voice and video. It only works over SIP or XMPP/Jingle - i.e.: the standards that the whole rest of the internet is using).
So you can OTR encrypt your chats over your Google Talk's XMPP session.

And there are clients supporting them either out-of-the-box (jitsi, adium) or with a plugin (pidgin), over your existing accounts (XMPP like Google Talk, or any random SIP provider).

In addition to the Google Talk client, there are many other clients out there that provide a great communications experience. We believe users should have choice in which clients they use to connect to the Google Talk service and we want to encourage the developer community to create new and innovative applications that leverage our service. To enable this, Google Talk uses the standard XMPP protocol for authentication, presence, and messaging.

What does this mean for those who care about security? For one, you can choose software that includes Off-the-Record end-to-end encryption (OTR) such as Pidgin with the OTR plugin on GNU+Linux or Windows, or Adium (which has OTR built-in and enabled by default) on Mac OS X. On Android you can use Beem or Gibberbot, although I personally recommend Beem (and if you are using iOS you obviously don't give a shit about security anyway). By using OTR, Google has no idea what you are typing, even as you use their servers to send & receive XMPP data. As a bonus, you can proxy any of these applications over Tor, so Google has no idea where you are even connecting from, anonymising your IP address.

Because of the benefits of an open protocol, the fact that Google is in the US is far less of a problem than Microsoft being in the US because Skype by design restricts your ability to know how it communicates with Microsoft's supernodes and other Skype clients. This is the very nature of proprietary software: to subjugate you, keep you ignorant, and wield power over you. Google may not be perfect, but at least they are committed to using open standards as the base level of their communication networks, and explicitely encourage people to use what software they want, allow proxied and/or Torified connections to their services, & allow you to use end-to-end encryption with crypto keys that YOU control.

TL,DR:

I am very happy to find out a friend has a Google account, so that as soon as they use it with OTR encryption, I can communicate with them safely & securely from my own XMPP server with end-to-end encryption using an standard, open protocol. Incomparably better than Skype.

That's right. However, according to Adium developers' statistics [1], only 13% of OS X users run 10.5 and 3.33% run 10.4. If you do the math and calculate probability with which someone can get infected, you will reach, I believe, very low numbers. 10.5 being apple's equivalent of vista, is dying every day and will be lost in the dust soon.

[1] http://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion

It was mine to begin with.
I just happened to hit "Reply" in the wrong thread and wanted to move where appropriate. I fucked up the copy-paste. And of course it does look the same in the preview pane, which didn't help.

Here are the missing links :
- Adium : http://adium.im/
- Pidgin : http://pidgin.im/
- OTR: http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/
- plugins downloads : http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/index.php#downloads middle column. It offers a Windows installer. For Linux there's source code (I use it), but it should be much simpler to use the package provided by your distribution's repository (it's in OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo. Don't know about the others)

(Checking in preview pane : Yup this time I didn't fuck up the URLs ;-) )

The quote itself is referencing third-party apps. Try comparing Adium to Pidgin, or TextMate to pretty much any other GUI text editor, or iWork to OpenOffice (not really a third-party app, but you get the picture). As a general rule of thumb, apps written for the Mac are better thought-out visually, are more consistent both with themselves and with the rest of the system, and often manage to do this without sacrificing power or features.

Hell, even Microsoft is susceptible to this: just look at their Bing iPhone app, and compare it to their own WinMo equivalent. It's like night and day.

Yep, every single thing costs money.

And there's absolutely no compatibility with any linux software at all.

You're 100% correct.

Like the iPhoto galleries on a real mac, looks nice but you can't export them to anything except MobileMe. Want remote desktop? Get MobileMe. Don't really fancy iTunes with no plugins? Well you're kinda screwed (Songbird isn't a viable alternative imho.) Want to play DivX on your phone? .. Got friends using MSN? Suck to be you!

And that's why I dislike Apple so much.

It's curious that you dislike Apple so much when almost every single one of your examples is made-up:

1. I seemed to remember exporting to places other than MobileMe before, so I opened up iPhoto upon reading your post. Sure enough, there is also built-in support for exporting your albums to Facebook, Flickr, and iWeb (and before you get started on iWeb, you most certainly can publish iWeb sites to servers other than MobileMe).
2. Your tirade against Remote Desktop makes no sense whatsoever. Apple's own page on Remote Desktop specifically notes that anyone with a VNC client can access a Mac remotely. All you have to do is enable Remote Management in Sharing preferences—MobileMe has nothing to do with it.
3. iTunes most certainly has plugin support. A Google search for "iTunes plugins" yielded an entire directly of them as the first result.
4. You may think you've finally cornered me with your DivX complaint, and indeed that's not one of the media formats iPhone supports natively, but surely you've heard of converting video formats with tools like ffmpegX. Maybe you've made half a point with this one.
5. Sadly for you, there's no other half point here. There are plenty of apps you can use for MSN chat, both on Macs and iPhones. BeejiveIM is one for iPhone, and Adium works great on Macs.

But I'm sure this was all a simple misunderstanding. Surely someone with such a low UID would never resort to misinformation or trolling.

Here's the official blog post about the issue:

Pidgin introduces support for Audio and Video Chat in 2.6.0; what about Adium?

don't expect it any time soon: http://trac.adium.im/wiki/VoiceAndVideo

Perhaps this is a good point in time to switch to Pidgin (multi-platform and my personal choice), Adium (Mac OS X), Empathy (Gnome), Kopete (KDE), or some other, more trustworthy client?