by Dave Thomas
Recently my good
friend John posted a tutorial on how to use Pidgin with OTR in order
to completely encrypt your Instant Messages. Which is essential if
you're concerned about the government reading your chatlogs. However,
is Pidgin with OTR really worth it if you're just an average user,
not concerned with security as much as you are with ease of access?
In my opinion, while Pidgin does offer several advantages over the
native chats clients it aims to replace, it can be a bit of a bear to
customize and certainly wont be replacing Skype anytime soon.
Pidgin is, by far
the best replacement I've found for Facebooks chat client, which is a
horrible monster that eats RAM and generally sucks. Pidgin is
smaller, easy to set up and efficient. It also works with Bonjour,
AIM, Jabber and all other manner of chat servers. The OTR pluggin,
which allows for you to encrypt all your chats over XMPP, the
protocol used by Facebook and Jabber to name a few, is easy and quick
to install and works completely on its own with very little effort.
As long as you and the person you're talking to both have OTR
installed it'll run all the encryption automatically and you don't
have to touch anything. Even someone who doesn't necessarily know how
to use a computer to its fullest potential should be able to install
and use Pidgin and OTR with little to no help, making it the most
user friendly encrypted chat client I've ever seen, on top if his,
the ability for it to work over Facebook makes it accessible to
anyone who has an account, meaning your grandma, your parents and
whoever else can use it without having to make any accounts or fumble
with any encryption keys.
Speaking of
grandmas, Pidgin does look like something you'd find on your granny's
Windows '98 machine. It's ugly. And while it's possible to make it
less ugly (Note I didn't say attractive) with minimal effort, it's
more than your average user would want to do, or even know how to go
about doing. The tutorial on Pidgin's website is clear enough, but I
personally still jacked it up three times before I got it working; I
don't know if that's a testament to my inability to follow directions
or the tutorial isn't good. Further, the API that is was used to
create Pidgin's GUI is the same API used to create most of the
dialogue boxes for all manner of free software, Deluge, GIMP, ect. So
changing the design of Pidgin has a some weird effects on those, such
as altering the fonts.
Personally I like
Pidgin with OTR, sure it's not going to be killing Skype anytime
soon, but it is a nice alternative to the chat clients out there
today and it's good for consolidating various services to one central
location. OTR is much easier to set up than encrypted email or
something like that, and it's capable of encrypting on sites you
almost definitely already are a part of. Overall it's very simple and
easy to configure and I would recommend it to anyone, not just people
looking for a good encrypted chat client, but to anyone who wants an
easier, better way to manage all their chats in one client.~
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