![]() ![]() With whatever name you want to give the chat, and tell someone else to go to the same page.Įven beyond its encryption, Cryptocat is superior to its traditional alternatives, like Skype, in some respects. No accounts or setup are required, so you can immediately set up a chat with anyone around the world without asking them to download a program first. There is no need to invite individual users to a large group chat simply putting the URL in a common location will suffice. The program also has a certain charm to it that strictly professional services like Skype lack it uses the names of animals as default usernames and its interface features imagery reminiscent of classic arcade games of the 1980s. However, the program does have its drawbacks. It has a smallar array of features, offering no voice or video chat and limiting its file transfer service to only images and zip archives up to 600 KB. ![]() The fact that it’s a browser-based program is a disadvantage as well as an advantage there is no way for the program to tell when someone’s online or offline as there is in Skype, limiting its utility as a program for chatting with friends or coworkers whenever they are online. A day later cryptography researcher, Nadim Kobeissi - best known for authoring the open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat (now discontinued) - had pulled in a pre-seed investment of 100,000 for his lightweight mesh-networked microservices concept, with support coming from angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. It has a Chrome extension and an Android app, but neither of these have any kind of notification functionality that allows them to remain useful without being the dominant application on the screen.īrowser applications, even ones that securely encrypt everything on the client side, do have a weakness in terms of security. While a desktop app with equivalent functionality only needs to have its code evaluated once, web applications essentially re-download the entire code to the user’s browser each time the program is loaded, so backdoors can be introduced at any time. Fortunately, however, the chrome extension and Android application solve this problem, as both types of software are downloaded and kept locally on the client.Īnother inconvenience is speed. A message takes a few seconds to make its way from one party to another, partially because of the encryption and partially because the software relies on both clients communicating through the centralized server rather than the semi-decentralized globally distributed network that Skype uses. Of course, this fault is excusable an individual with Nadim Kobeissi’s limited resource does not have the capacity to make the types of physical networking optimizations that corporations like Microsoft and Google can set up. ![]()
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