[Bender]

unlike IRC

There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.

OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.

E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]

[1] - https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr

[2] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr

[3] - https://archive.ph/4wi5t

[progval]

Links 1 and 2 have not had updates in 10 and 8 years respectively, they probably don't even compile anymore. They implement OTRv3 which was published in about 2005 and uses 1536-bits primes. As far as I know, neither the protocol nor the implementations were audited (and especially not audited recently). This is not good encryption at all.

Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.

[Bender]

I use link [1] all the time. It comes pre-compiled for many Linux distributions but not installed by default. And yeah like I said it needs cipher updates like was recently performed in OpenSSH. HN has a handful of cryptographic nerds that could update OTR in their sleep if they so desired maybe even rewrite in Rust but being cryptographic nerds they probably have no need. If the same is true with cryptographers as is with car mechanics and plumbers they probably only use plain text as mechanics have broken down cars in their yards and some plumbers have old leaky pipes due to burn out.

[queenkjuul]

As a mechanic-minded person, all the broken down junk i plan to fix someday has no bearing on the state of the tools i actually use day to day

(In my case, all the old broken guitar pedals and vintage computers littering my house have no bearing on the state of my workstations and gigging setup)

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

To what is [3] pointing

Why not provide the URL

Some people cannot access archive.today sites

These sites also serve CAPTCHAs. They block users who prefer not to use Javascript for non-interactive www use, e.g., reading documents

[Bender]

Some have reported not being able to browse .ru sites.

The source URL is at the top of the page as is for every archive.{is|ph|today} snapshot.

[notepad0x90]

Those are all opportunistic. being able to talk to anyone secure, even if they haven't setup a special client with special plugins is important.