bbs VS ricochet

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63

People should be aware that privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.

I never trusted Signal due to https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/60

VPNs are totally detectable - its your traffic eg what ur searching up that is hard or impossible to decrypt. to make the VPN TRAFFIC itself undetectable, you have to obfuscate it. Now there could be a lot of reasons as to how your school blocked your vpn. The ports expressvpn use may have been blocked, for example. I personally don't use express vpn but use my own, but protocols like wireguard which MAY (im not sure) be used by express vpn use udp packets and the school could have just completely dropped them completely (Most games use udp packets since its faster), or the ip ranges you have been assigned on expressvpn may have just been blocked from the school wifi. As for why the cheap free vpn may be able to bypass your school wifi, it could be that it avoids the reasons above OR its something different like a proxy, which is what I use to bypass the restrictions at my high school. The fix, or what I do, is I setup my own servers. The price of a vps server at digital ocean is like 4 dollars a month, probably around the same price if not cheaper than expressvpn. Get yourself one, setup your own proxy server and connect to that. You can search around for tutorials, but the one I use is VMESS+TCP, essentially disguising the proxy traffic as a tcp packet so that the school can't distinguish it from regular traffic. Find a tutorial online, probably ask around on here: https://github.com/net4people/bbs If you followed a guide and still can't get it to work, your gna have to find an unblocked port. I would try 443 or 123 first since usually those aren't blocked but for my school 3478 is the one that works.

This looks like a much more polished alternative to Ricochet: https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet

Ricochet seems dead. It's been five years since its last commit to their git repo, and their website's certificate expired last year. This is probably why you can't find much information.

I think something like Ricochet (if it were still actively maintained) could be a good solution.

https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet

Every user is their own Tor onion service, so you get E2E encryption and no centralized servers. The whole thing hinges on the security of Tor itself which is probably a safe enough bet.

With that being said, if I had just one piece of advice - try to avoid ostentatious phrases like Speek is by far the most secure way to converse or 100% anonymous. Tor itself is not 100% anonymous, so that should immediately make anyone cautious. One of the things that I admired about the original Ricochet was that the developers never made brazen claims about their software. In fact, quite the opposite.

Check out https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/blob/master/doc/prot.... It is metadata-free. It does not require a centralized server. It uses Tor.

[1] https://cwtch.im/ [2] https://ricochet.im/

Abandoned, unmaintained, deprecated or unreleased: Ricochet, TOR Messenger, Cwtch

ricochet.im website not working (??)

> there isn't a currently easily available obvious way to have private secure conversations.

Ricochet[1] works really well. It uses Tor hidden services to communicate. Your Ricochet ID is your onion address. To add a contact, you input their Ricochet ID and a short message, and Ricochet connects to their onion address and sends a contact request. If the contact request is accepted then you'll each show up as a contact on each other's client and can chat whenever you want.

Tor is really perfect for this, you can't get more private or censorship-resistant than Tor.

The UI is currently not great, but that's not a protocol problem.

The biggest problem with Ricochet is that hardly anyone is using it.

[1] https://ricochet.im/