- Debian releases version 4.0, codenamed “Etch”.
- Gaim changes its name to Pidgin, due to legal pressure from AOL.

This is great news for the Free Software world. Debian, being the most forked Linux distribution with the largest and most widely used package management tool apt, and Gaim (now Pidgin), being the most widely used IM client in the Free Software world with probably the most used library (libgaim, now libpurple) for other IM clients.

This preceding the news of Ubuntu Feisty being released in just 11 days.

1. Gaim
2. Kopete
3. Gajim
4. Gossip
5. aMSN

I look at those clients, and recognize that there isn’t a single standard between any two of them for encrypting your messages. There are just too many options:

• gaim-encryption: Only works with Gaim, or clients implementing the Gaim code.
• otr: a good alternative, working with Gaim, Adium for Mac and Trillian for Windows, but not available for other clients.
• otr-proxy: probably a better alternative than it’s parent, allowing any IM client that can utilize a proxy access. However, at the moment, it only works for AIM and ICQ protocols, alienating many users.
• GnuPG: In my opinion, the best alternative using your personal GnuPG keypair, but, only implemented in Gajim and Psi.

I’m sure there are other options, but I think the point is made. I should be able to choose any IM client, and encrypt my traffic with a standard spec that is implemented across the table, regardless of which client my friends choose.

As mentioned, I personally favor using my private and public GnuPG keypair. To me, that just makes sense. Why keep track of two keys, one for IM, and the other for everything else? But, I would be willing to see otr or otr-proxy as the standard as well. The point is just setting the standard, then implementing it across clients.

As such, here is another poll. Should an encryption standard be set, regardless of IM client or protocol, given the information that I outlined here?

I should mention that I use Jabber as my means of IM communication. Jabber, by default, implements SSL/TLS. So, my traffic is already incrypted on the wire with my friends. However, can I trust that the Jabber server I or my friends connect to are not decrypting and logging the chat sessions? Something to think about.

Well, since connecting, I just need a client that connects to Jabber only. Because I only use Linux, I don’t need one that is cross-platform compatible, although that would be nice if needed. Well, through the past little bit, I have been torn from what client to use. I want a client that has good encryption capabilities, and has SOCKS 5 proxy support. I want a client that can send a single message to more than one contact simultaneously, and I want a client that takes advantage of the features that Jabber offers, such as resources and priority. I don’t care about eye candy, themes, plugins, or any of that.

Well, Gaim certainly isn’t meeting my needs, and the Gaim devs aren’t interested in listening to its user base. So it’s goodbye Gaim. I don’t see why I should use FOSS when the devs aren’t listening to the Gaim community. Just browse through the feature requests, and you’ll see what I mean.

So, from here on out, PSI meets all my needs great, with Gajim coming in a close 2nd. And, the Psi devs and Gajim devs are interested in their users and what they have to say.

Why am I posting this with such a negative tone? Because maybe I can help others who connect to Jabber see the light also, and if the Gaim devs ever stop by my blog, maybe they’ll open their eyes a little, and make the client much more usable.

Regardless of who I am talking to, regardless of what instant messaging client I am using, and regardless of what protocol I am using, I should be able to protect my conversation from the prying eyes of others. There shouldn’t be any hassle on what to implement and what encryption software to use, even though the algorithm would have to be the same, obviously.

In other words, in a perfect IM world, I should be able to log into the Jabber network using the Gajim client on Linux, and talk to Joe, who is using the Adium X client on his Mac, and have an encrypted conversation. The conversation would employ public key cryptography using GPG as the encryption standard. However, there should be no issue using PGP and GPG together. If I can most certainly use the two together when encrypting and decrypting files, then chats should be no different.

Now, in the real world, I can’t have an encrypted conversation with Joe, because the plugin for Adium X doesn’t play nice with my encryption capabilities on Gajim, Gaim, Psi, (insert favorite client here). Just tell him to use Gaim, or a client I am using, right? Wrong!! This just isn’t a headache for Mac users, it’s a headache for EVERY different IM client that utilizes encryption. The only two that I know that play well together is Gajim and Psi. And that is only the case, because they were both built using the same API’s.

So, let’s look at the nitty-gritty of it all. I’m a Jabber user, so I’ll review Jabber clients.

Gaim has three options. There is the Gaim-encryption plugin, the Off-The-Record (OTR) plugin and the Gaim-e plugin. The Gaim-e plugin is the only plugin that uses your personal GPG key that you already have (if you created one, obviously). Unfortunately, it looks like the project is no longer in development, as the SourceForge page has been down for some time. The other two plugins, Gaim-encryption and OTR, use their own standards for encrypting. This means that unless the buddy you are chatting with is also using Gaim and using the matching plugin, it won’t work. So even though Gaim may be the all-in-one for all your personal needs, it seems to be the client that creates the most issues for other users. Just because it may be the most widely used, does not mean it can do it’s own thing in this regard.

Gajim and Psi are much less headache prone. For one, they started off on the right foot. They are completely different Jabber clients, and yet they play very well with each other with regards to encryption. They both utilize your personal GPG key pair. This is very handy, because not only is a standard developed, I don’t have to use the client to decrypt the conversation. As I log all of my chats, I can decrypt the conversation without the need of the client. This is very handy. They may not be the all-in-one solution that Gaim is (multi-protocol, IRC, etc), but they work and do a good job at it. Unfortunately, Gaim (except for Gaim-e) and other clients and plugins don’t play at all with Gajim and Psi. Does this mean that I have to have 2 or 3 or 4 clients installed to have encrypted conversations with different people? I shouldn’t have to, I can tell you that.

I could continue with other clients, both proprietary and FOSS, but suffice it to say, encryption interoperability between clients is a pain. I shouldn’t have to alienate contacts in my buddy list because they use a different client than I do or a different plugin. So, here is what I propose to streamline the process:

• Utilize your personal GPG key. So Gaim makes it easy with a simple plugin to install. When it comes to encryption, easy usually means weakening security. Besides, if someone is interested in encrypting their conversations, chances are that they will do what is necessary, which would mean creating a personal GPG key. Now they have one key, not several, for email, files, and chats. They key should also be used regardless of messaging protocol.
• Utilize the same API and protocol for the key exchange. Even if a personal GPG key is created, it is useless if different clients cannot communicate with the keys. This means the transport of the public key to the other client needs to be streamlined in one API. Gajim and Psi are the perfect example of such an exchange.
• Make the IM encryption standard platform independent.Finally, the above two standards aren’t completely functional if they can’t be implemented across several platforms. This includes Linux, Macintosh, Windows, *BSD, Solaris, etc. This standard should be the defining crux of all three. By doing so, this ensures that the most people are reached, and that the least amount of headache is created. Keeping these standards platform independent really is the most important of the three

There should be a governing body in place that sees these ideals as I do. If not, I am willing to start one if anyone would be interested helping me. I wouldn’t know how though, and I do have other responsibilities. Still, I think such a body should be in place, whether I start it or not.

Now, I am sure that you have all sorts of concerns or insights regarding this post. Please, please, I am interested in what they are. Comment below and let them be heard. Thanks.

UPDATE: I just learned that Adium X uses the OTR plugin that Gaim can also use. Those two clients can communicate securely. This is a step in the right direction, although not perfect.

Due to the decision of switching to Jabber exclusively, I am on the lookout for a good Jabber client for Linux. In fact, a cross-platform client for Windows and Mac OS X would be nice too, but not necessary. Gaim is good, as it takes advantage of the Jabber IM protocol, but it lacks in many features that even less mature clients have already implemented. I needed something more and I stumbled across Psi.

Psi (pronounced “sigh”), is a cross-platform Jabber client written using the Qt libraries from Trolltech. Upon initial discovery, Psi is very KDE-ish, if you will. The icons, and implementation of the Qt libraries make it fit well with KDE. Looking further into the client, shows a very mature level of development, even for a 0.10 release.

The first feature I was eagerly looking for, that is not implemented in Gaim, was sending a single message to multiple contacts. I get a lot of crap for this feature, as people ask why. Plain an simple. As president of my local LUG, I would like to send a message to the LUG reminding them about a meeting or activity. Maybe I would like to send a message to all my family about some certain reminder. At any event, it is very useful. Luckily, Psi has this feature implemented.

Next, I wanted a client with encryption security. Now many clients implement this with a plugin. Gaim is one such client that requires a plugin if you would like your messages to be sent encrypted. The problem with Gaim and the advantage with Psi is PGP keys. Gaim uses a builtin encryption layer which works, but how do I know the strength of the keys between myself and the person I am communicating with? How do I know that there isn’t a backdoor or other such security issue with the plugin? Sure, it’s OSS, so just pull the code up and check myself, but I want to know without digging through code that my conversations are in fact safe.

With using individual PGP or GnuPG keys that each user has, as well as my own personal GnuPG key, I can rest assured that my conversation is safe, with no worries of breaking the encryption or security issues. The only drawback to this, is if the user you would like to communicate does not have a PGP or GnuPG key, you can’t engage in that secure communication. Also, it only works with other Psi users or clients that use the PGP or GnuPG keys rather than plugins. In other words, I can’t have an encrypted conversation with you if you use Gaim and I use Psi. At least not that I am aware of at the moment.

Lastly, this client is lightweight, and fast. It takes literally no time to launch the application, and everything just seems very snappy. Again, this is very impressive for a 0.10 release. I honestly can’t wait to see what 1.0 brings to the table.

Ok, everything is great and all, and I’ve hopefully convinced you to at least try it out. So how do I use my Gmail account with Psi? Good question. It is actually quite easy. The Psi wiki actually has a post with screenshots and setting it up along with troubleshooting questions. The only question you may have is why a plaintext login would be required to login. Well, the same reason a plaintext login is required when you pull up the Gmail web interface- so Gmail can authenticate you. Don’t worry, though, your password is send along the SSL encryption layer, so people sniffing the network packets won’t be able to read it. I know, I tried. In a nutshell, here is how to setup your Gmail account with Psi including screenshots.

First, obviously, you need to create a new account. You can all it whatever you want. “Home”, “Work”, “LUG”, whatever. The name of the account doesn’t matter. Next, you need add your JID (Jabber ID) which in this case would be the full email address of your Gmail account. Don’t forget to enter your password

Lastly, we just need to setup our connection to the Gmail servers. No proxy is needed unless you connect to them by default. We want every checkbox here checked. In other words, we do want to use SSL encryption when sending the login info, we want to supress all SSL warnings, use a plaintext login, keep our connection alive and specify what server we would like to connect to. The server is “talk.google.com” port 5223 or 5222. Save and exit.

Connect, and begin to enjoy using Psi.

Two days ago, I posted about Open Discussion Day, and how I will be making the switch to the open IM protocol Jabber and leaving the legacy IM services.  I was excited, yet nervous.  Kinda like making the plunge into Linux for the first time.  Not exactly sure how things were going to work out.  Well, it looks like I might not be making the switch fully after all.

My sister is serving an 18-month mission in Texas for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  She left in October of last year, which means we won’t be seeing her until April or May of next year.  She is doing an awesome job out there, and really progressing the work of the Lord.

Well, yesterday, I received quite the surprise.  She sent me an instant message via MSN.  I was shocked.  I thought they could only check their email from an email service provided by the Church.  So when did instant messaging become okay?  After talking about it, I guess the Mission President gave them the OK, as long as it is family and just on preparation day.

We had a good long conversation, and she is going great out in the field.  It is really wonderful to hear from her.  But know what do I do?  I can’t make the switch to Jabber on May 19th now.  How is that going to go over?  “Thanks sis, but no thanks.  My beliefs in OSS are more important than my relationship with my family.  So I won’t be able to talk to you any more.”  Yeah, right.

So now I struggle.  I struggle with still connecting to a proprietary protocol even though I want really bad to make the switch to Jabber and become proprietary-free.  Jabber does have the ability to use “transports”, or connect to legacy IM services through Jabber itself.  But that is kind of like running WINE in Linux just so you can use your Windows software.  Why not just use Windows itself?

At any rate, I now have the hiccups, and I am struggling very much on what to do.  I could just tell people that if they ask for my IM account, I can tell them Jabber while still keeping my MSN account for my family.  I could use Jabber exclusively, and connect to MSN using the Jabber transport.  Or I could just leave MSN and all the rest altogether, seeing as though I and thousands of other missionaries never had the option to IM their families while serving a mission, so why should I give her that priviledge?

I guess there are many ways to get rid of these hiccups, it just seems that none of them work.

Anyway, I feel that the best way to deal with my insomnia, instead of watch lame infomercials on television, is hang out in IRC, like I do during the day anyway. I guess other people must sleep, however, because no one is on tonight, including IM, which sucks.

So, I thought I would go through my IM contact list, and begin weeding out contacts that I no longer use. During this weeding process, I thought of a better organizational structure using subgroups within groups. To my dismay, I found that Gaim v1.5.1cvs does not support subgroups. This is the second feature that I find would be incredibly useful for many users, but is not included.

The first feature I stumbled across, that should be implemented at all costs, is sending a single message to multiple contacts. Every other IM client I have used, whether on Windows, Mac or Linux, has this feature. Gaim does not. Upon investigation of the feature requests, I see that every request to add this feature has be rejected.

Themes aren’t a big deal to me, as for the most part, I am not an eye candy person, and prefer my RAM to look. Except when it comes to XGL. That’s a different matter entirely. I don’t care much for emoticons or cool sounds either. I only use or for my smilies, and I always have my system on mute unless listening to music.

But those two features I mentioned earlier should definitely be implemented in v2.0.