Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:58
bram (bram@gawth.com)
Tue, 18 Aug 1998 17:48:20 -0700 (PDT)
On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Berke Durak wrote:
> I was dreaming for about two years of a distributed/serverless, encrypted
> (and possibly anonymous) multi-user Internet chat protocol, that would replace
> IRC, and which would not require centralized servers to operate (which
> impose control on users). I'm sure many people are thinking of such a thing.
Chat is a deceptively simple problem. After a nifty little application is
created (generally within a very short period of time - tcp/ip is magical
that way) it runs headlong into the identity problem.
Who I am is Bram, an entity living outside of the digital world (more
specifically, a human.) My 'real' identity is not to be confused with
whatever public keys I might have - those may change over time. Nor is it
to be confused with the email address bram@gawth.com, where I may be
reached currently but might not be reachable at in a few years. My 'real'
identity never changes.
The identity problem is exactly the same for sending encrypted email, and
exactly the some for talking to one's bank. In fact, it's even harder to
do for chat, because of the transeince of the parties involved. I predict
that that encrypted chat won't become commonplace until secure online
banking with something more robust than credit card numbers becomes
commonplace.
Even after jumping over those hurdles, chat runs into problems of
protocol, and the myriad different forms of realtime communication people
might want to have. It is probable the hardest of the currently available
internet technologies to make support encryption. My prediction is that
once the identity problem is solved, existing chat programs will be
modified to support it, rather than new ones being written.
My suggestion for a useful application would be an encrypted protocol
similar to ftp which works well across firewalls, supports resuming of
uploading/downloading, and has a nice explorer-style UI. It still has the
identity problem, but in the exact same way ssh does, and ssh's solution
works reasonably well in practice. I've gone through a LOT of aggravation
due to the lack of such a product, and if one were created I'd use it
CONSTANTLY.
-Bram
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:58