In recent releases, developers of the seminal open source ‘Conversations‘ Jabber Android app have added two really cool new features: Group Chat encryption and the ability to edit the last message that was sent.
Encrypting group chats is not quite simple as every user has its own secret key. Thus, group chats were only secured by TLS from, to and between the servers for the group chat so far but not on the server itself. It was a bit of the drawback which is why this feature has been on the wishlist for quite some time. Now it’s finally been added and it works great in practice.
A condition to enable group chat encryption is that the chat has been marked private and that all participants in the chat know each other and have previously exchanged their public keys. If these conditions are met the group chat screen now lets the user activate OMEMO encryption just like in one to one conversations!
The second new brilliant feature is that the last sent message can be edited after it has been sent. On the receiver side the edited message is shown with a little pencil on the side to indicate that it was changed if the user has activated the feature in the settings. In the default case for people who don’t like modification of already received messages the edited message will be shown as a new message. The best for both worlds!
Kudos to the developers this is really great! And for those of you who have never heard of ‘Conversations’ before, here’s my initial post on the app.
With such cool clients like Conversations, i can’t understand peoples reluctance to try to build their own independent and privacy-perfect* messenging eco-system.
I love my prosody-conversations combo and i love using it. Too bad too few people use it.
*privacy-perfect: it is hard to get any better if you take care of transport encryption, e2e encryption, open source server and open source client. Of course you have to trust your B-Party as well as their sense of taking care of your privacy! But my data is probaly well known at facebook and whats-app due to lots of “friends” not taking care of such issues and using the so-easy friendsfinder features of these privacy-nightmares.