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Domain: gale.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to gale.org.

Comments · 15

  1. gale by John+Meacham · · Score: 1 · on Good Open Source, Multi-Platform, Secure IM Client?

    there is gale which is secure, protocol based, distributed, and quite nice all around.

  2. gale by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative · on Good Open Source, Multi-Platform, Secure IM Client?

    Gale -- http://www.gale.org/

    It's secure, easy to set up (including both client and server), and there are multiple clients for it, including both command-line and GUIs, and for both Linux and Windows.

    All messages are cryptographically signed (unless the user chooses to send anonymously), and messages can be either plain-text or encrypted, depending on who they're being sent to.

  3. gale by thulorn · · Score: 2 · on Jabber As The Coming IM Standard?
    Longer spiel: it supports strong encryption mostly transparently to the user: a keypair is generated the first time you use it (without PGP's keyboard input) and public keys are passed around like baseball cards by the clients, without users ever worrying. Trust model is a simple rooted tree.

    Default UI is most similar to zephyr, which gale was a reaction to. gale is multidomain, and in theory more scalable across the internet. Encryption for secrecy mostly operates with private messages; public messages have equal standing, and those live in hierarchical categories, which look like Usenet newsgroups, but the subscription is hierarchical: subbing to 'rec.arts' would catch all 'rec.arts.tv' and 'rec.arts.books' traffic. Encryption still comes into play with public messages in signing for authentication.

    There is a graphical python/Tk client.

    Status: it works perfectly fine for private messages, and there's a buzzing little community with people from Caltech, MIT, CMU, and a few companies, so the multidomain stuff works fine, although there are occasionally hiccups in finding people's public keys, I think usually releated to firewalls. The theoretical scalability is hampered by bugs making multiple servers know about each other dangerous (looping problems), plus the whole concept of public categories is being reworked.

    So it's not ready to be used by a million people, at least not a million people all talking together as opposed to isolated cells, but it does work fine for small cells (I think some companies are using it internally) and has neat features, particularly automatic encryption and authentication, and the hierarchical public categories.

    More info at gale.org.

  4. Re:Jabber Crypto Tunnel by wtanaka · · Score: 2 · on Jabber As The Coming IM Standard?

    You might want to check out gale. While it does not use PGP, it does support strong encryption of messages sent using it.

  5. Gale Secure Messaging Service gale.org by billstewart · · Score: 2 · on IRC Improvements

    The Gale secure messaging service is in version 0.99a. FAQ. The name is a takeoff on MIT Zephyr. Goals include scalability as well as security. The Gale documentation has a page comparing Other secure instant messaging systems.

  6. Gale Secure Messaging Service gale.org by billstewart · · Score: 2 · on IRC Improvements

    The Gale secure messaging service is in version 0.99a. FAQ. The name is a takeoff on MIT Zephyr. Goals include scalability as well as security. The Gale documentation has a page comparing Other secure instant messaging systems.

  7. Gale Secure Messaging Service gale.org by billstewart · · Score: 2 · on IRC Improvements

    The Gale secure messaging service is in version 0.99a. FAQ. The name is a takeoff on MIT Zephyr. Goals include scalability as well as security. The Gale documentation has a page comparing Other secure instant messaging systems.

  8. Gale by buildboy · · Score: 2 · on Secure Instant Messaging Systems?
    Gale is such a system ( from http://www.gale.org/docs.xml ):

    Gale is instant messaging software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

    Several features set Gale apart from other instant messaging systems.

    Gale is open source software. The GPL ensures that you and others retain the freedom to modify and distribute the Gale source code. Gale will never lock into any one vendor's proprietary, closed system.
    Gale is useful. Gale isn't just about poking "private" messages to someone sitting at another computer. Gale does support secure private messaging, but Gale also has a well-developed infrastructure for public (and semi-public) chat.
    Advanced categorization and filtering features mean that you can precisely control your level of participation and distraction. We've been at this for years, we've tried everything else out there, and we have a lot of experience with the usability of real-time messaging systems. The result of our experience is something like IRC, something like Zephyr, and something like commercial "instant messaging" systems, but with many features you won't find in any of these.
    Gale is secure. Most other systems depend on the security of a central bank of servers, and provide no protection against network eavesdroppers.
    Gale uses strong cryptography for both privacy and authentication, and is designed to work in an environment of mutual distrust between users and administrators.
    Gale scales. Gale's architecture uses a loosely-connected set of servers which locate each other via DNS only when they need to talk to each other. Multicast is accomplished by the dynamic creation of self-healing spanning trees of interconnected servers. The network is robust; servers and clients detect and route around failure. This means Gale is fast and stable. Gale will not suffer the kind of performance and reliability problems USENET, IRC, and centralized commercial message systems do.
    Gale is here today. Gale has been in active development for over three years. Both clients and servers have been well tested by daily use in an active user community. Both simple command-line and sophisticated graphical clients are available, and there are platform solutions for the POSIX, Microsoft Windows, and Java platforms.
  9. What about Gale? by shren · · Score: 1 · on AOL To Open AIM Protocol?

    I can't believe that nobody mentioned Gale, and now it's too late for me to mention it and have a significant portion of people see it. Ack!

    Gale

  10. Encryption Policies make Pranking Easy by billstewart · · Score: 1 · on Prankster Spoofs President Clinton in CNN Online Chat
    It's nice to see the President bitten by the consequences of the Adminstration's anti-encryption policies. Digital signatures are not tough to implement, but their deployment in chatware has been impeded by the FBI's wiretap-everything demands and the NSA's leftover Cold War mentailty, just as the deployment of encryption and signatures in email, routing, firewalls, and other networking systems have been.


    Yes, it's possible to do signatures without also adding encryption capability - the laws have been relatively explicit about that on paper, if not in practice. But the most common signature algorithm, RSA, also does encryption, so it's only usable by software that ignores the encryption regulations. And one prominent authentication system - John Gilmore's export request for DNSSEC name servers, which can protect the Internet from the forgery that's commonly used to attack systems - was refused export permission (retroactively, after the permission had initially been granted.)


    Developing a good interface for authentication on chatware takes work - you don't want to hang five lines of "---BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE--" on every line of chat. Cooperative development is an important method for developing good interfaces - but it's one of the areas hardest hit by the encryption regulations, especially cooperation between Americans and Non-Americans (not only Non-Americans outside the US, but foreign college students here in the US as well.)


    There are a few projects for secure chat that I'm aware of - GALE, at www.gale.org, is a relatively sophisticated system that's inspired by MIT's Zephyr system. It's an open architecture with several different clients developed by several different people. And of course, people are always developing new IRC clients, but patching security on to things can be tough.

  11. Re:Open Source is not innovative??? by Lars+Arvestad · · Score: 3 · on Dave McAllister (SGI) on Linux and Chilli
    What I think he means is that open source projects don't tend to be radical new
    concepts/services, just free versions of a commercial product.
    But commercial/closed source don't tend to be very innovating either. There have been loads of word processors and spreadsheet programs and DTP applications. Given how much resources that go into commercial software developing, the output is disappointing IMHO. Has anyone ever tried to justify these claims?

    It is so easy, as you also point out, to give examples of revolutionary open source projects. What would the PC market look like had it not been for WWW browsers and servers from CERN and NCSA?
    Open source projects, from time to time, do outrageous things and MS will have to shell out more billions of dollars to mirror open source projects.

    AOL is another annoying example. AOL rules their messaging protocol, and there is nothing we can do about it. It's our fault for not doing it first.
    I think this is an example of something different. I was using finger and talk ten years ago for instant messaging. It worked excellent (finger was much more useful then than today and talk was simple and convenient on a text terminal) and surely it was open source? But commercial messaging systems has taken over because commercial companies rule the desktop market and probably also because of marketing. How much marketing does an initiative such as Gale get?

    I believe the strength of commercial companies is in grabbing market share more than innovating. This may change with Red Hat et al. We'll see.

    Lars

    --
  12. Re:very nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1 · on PGPphone Source Released
    encrypted text communication? You want gale.

    http://www.gale.org./ It's still kind of in flux though.

  13. Re:Security by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Messaging Software Wars
    There are only two messaging systems I know of that have any security.


    The first is zephyr from MIT's project athena, and
    a) it doesn't encrypt, only authenticate
    b) it requires a kerberos domain to be set up for authentication
    c) messaging between kerberos domains has some issues.


    The second is gale ( http://www.gale.org./) It has none of these problems, but it is still under development.

  14. Wow - all these projects by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Open Real Time Messaging System
    Zephyr, works exactly like this: zwrite user@realm

    So does gale: gsend user@domain

    Zephyr requires keberos to be authenticated though. Gale is based on public key pairs. No passwords to remember, authentication and encryption are end-to-end. The servers just pass the data through to the clients that want it. It also does public chat as well as instant messaging.

  15. Gale by logicTrAp · · Score: 1 · on Open Real Time Messaging System

    It's worth pointing out the GALE project as well.