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Hello and welcome to techplus your place for tech plus new. This tutorial is going to be centered around encrypted instant messaging. We are going to show you how to sign up for a XMPP service (like jabber). Install the IM client pidgin, and the OTR (off-the-record messaging) plugin. So that you can start having secure communications with your peers. This tutorial is for Windows 7 if you are on Linux check out riseup.net's tutorial on OTR https://www.riseup.net/en/otr#introduction-to-otr.

First we have to make a jabber account. Due to migrating databases register.jabber.org isn't allowing new account registration at the time of this tutorial so we are going to make our accounts on http://www.jabber.co.nz/about/ https://wtfismyip.com/jabber/register Make sure you remember your username and password because you will need it!

UPDATE 01/9/2014 5:07PM: Lately me and Dave have been experiencing trouble connecting to jabber.co.nz and for this reason will likely be moving to a different XMPP server. If you experience trouble try to find another server yourself. Here is a list https://list.jabber.at/ our recommendations will follow shortly.

UPDATE 01/10/2014 9:22PM: We've decided on a jabber server that works for us and amended the tutorial to reflect that. wtfismyip has an US based jabber server (which you can also connect to via their hidden service, if you don't know what that is we'll discuss that at a later date) that appears more stable than jabber.co.nz. The picture below has been changed to reflect this decision.

This picture was originally - http://imgur.com/WPRHAy1

second we are going to download pidgen https://pidgin.im/ just click "download now" and it should redirect you to the sourceforge download page. Once you have it downloaded go ahead and install it. Make sure you install it as an administrator (if you don't know if you are logged in as admin just right click the .exe and click "run as administrator." You need to do this because the OTR plugin seems to need administrative privilages to work and won't see that you have pidgin install otherwise.

Thirdly we are going to download and install the OTR plugin. Off-the-record messaging is the encryption plugin that will allow you to have secure conversations. Go to https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ and click "Win32 installer for pidgin-otr" at the bottom. Then install it. If you did everything above correctly then we should be ready to go!

Start up pidgin and add your account. The options are pretty self explanatory as mentioned above we are using XMPP as the protocol so just use jabber.co.nz wtfismyip.com as the Domain and make sure your username and password are correct 

Once you've successfully logged into your account go into tools > Plugins and check "Off-the-Record Messaging"

Now you have to get one of your friends to follow all the steps you just followed and then you can begin chatting with them securely. To add your friend go to Buddies > Add Buddy. Then type in their username@jabber.co.nz username@wtfismyip.com (or whatever XMPP server they're using) also make sure to type in an alias because otherwise you will see a large string of numbers after their name. Now click Add.

Now you can start chatting with your friend over OTR just right click their name and click IM or double click their name. If both of you have it configured correctly it should start automatically. Happy chatting!

If you have any problems contact us at techplus1010@gmail.com

~ John Martinez