Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New AIM Offering "end to end" Encryption

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

MankyD writes "The current AIM beta is now offering message encryption. They don't offer a lot of details but it's nice to see they are offering some extra privacy. Will the new AIM be illegal in Michigan?"

3 of 329 comments (clear)

  1. Locking out clients? by mkro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Will they finally be able to make AIM incompatible with unauthorized (Read: Open source) clients?

    --
    I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
  2. Re:Thank god by swtaarrs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AIM is very insecure by nature. I downloaded Ethereal, a packet sniffer, and it has built in filters for extracting AIM messages out of the packets AIM sends. So anyone with a packet sniffer program and half a brain can easily eavesdrop on your conversation. And under the PATRIOT act, the US government can do this any time they want... ugh

  3. Re:GPG by gbooker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As a Fire developer myself, I thought that I could contribute a little more to this. We have started to participate in a discussion on the best way to do encryption over IM protocols. This discussion can be found here: http://www.chat.solidhouse.com/smsn/. The GAIM-E author has even contributed to this discussion.

    Also, we have drastically improved the way that the GPG encryption is handled. It now works on more protocols and will be more consistent. My favorite is that we now correctly recognize a gpg installed by fink.

    Here is how I invision this in the end. Assuming that AOL didn't use PGP (or GPG), then we (OS Client Authors) should try to support their protocol, along with PGP (or GPG) which would be considered more secure.

    Glad to run across another satisfied Fire user.

    --
    You see? It's like I've always said. You can get more with a kind word and a 2x4 than you can with just a kind word.