c-toxcore
oxen-core
c-toxcore | oxen-core | |
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20 | 25 | |
2,158 | 299 | |
0.5% | -1.3% | |
9.5 | 0.0 | |
6 days ago | 4 days ago | |
C | C++ | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 only | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
c-toxcore
- Tox Core is one of the nicest-to-read C codebases
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uTox – The Lightweight Tox Client
See also this somewhat infamous thread on Tox's cryptographic design[1].
[1]: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426
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Tox seems slowly dying (change my mind), what alternatives have you researched?
In case with Tox you have to trust in homebrew crypto that was never properly audited (how about that security issue reported by Donenfeld in 2017, which is being tackled only now, sort of?) -- and outdated and outright abandoned clients which were never above, let's say, "beta quality".
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qTox unmaintained. Is this the end of qTox?
it has the new group chat feature (https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/pull/2269)
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Российские спецслужбы научились следить за пользователями Telegram
"If Tox already does onion routing, why use Tox over Tor?"
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My list of favorite secure messaging apps
What an arbitrary criteria to judge a project by. There have been 5 releases in the past year, including a major feature release.
https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/releases
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I know Privacy Guides is the new version of Privacy Tools, but even if so, do the recommendations (or at least most of them) in the old site still apply today?
Signal isn't falling behind and Tox is an old service that has had issues with messages being spoofable since day 1
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Shadiness in the Privacy Space: Jonah Aragon's (PrivacyGuides) Failed Attempt to Takeover PrivacyTools.io
tox https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426
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E2E encrypted voice and chat service similar to Discord/Slack?
You could use a Tox front end like qTox or Toxic. It is a fully encrypted end-to-end communication protocol that allows text, voice, and video chat. The github page for the Tox protocol has some useful caveats about the its security.
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Tox: Decentralized and Encrypted Instant Messaging
It links to a bug report discussion where one of the developers states that they don't understand the security properties of tox very well[1].
I find that worrying.
[1] https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426
oxen-core
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[PSA] Official communities are having an outage right now
Every official Session community hosted on the getsession.org domain, as well as the official websites (https://getsession.org, https://oxen.io) are unreachable as of now. https://lokinet.org seems to have issues as well.
- Tor vs Oxen Lokinet . How does the performance compare?
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Monero integration in BLACK protocol, a privacy focused fork of THORChain
Oxen is very much alive, as is Haven. Technologically Electroneum is very far away now, not being a privacy coin anymore, but it did start as a Monero fork and at least is still around.
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My list of favorite secure messaging apps
Really great list. Thank you. Some of these I wasn't even aware of. I've been using Session for about a year. A year ago it definitely had some missed messages and I was about to ditch it but I held strong and haven't experienced that issue in a while. Been flawless for about half a year. The Oxen/Loki network overall https://oxen.io/ is a really interesting alternative to Monero and Tor. It's interesting how it can be both!
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Signal Says It Will Exit India Rather Than Compromise Its Encryption
Widely used? No. I've found Session to be a decent alternative however it's still early development which entails some scuff and details as to how they intend for it to be financially supported long term aren't clear.
https://getsession.org/
TLDR on Session is that it's a fork of Signal (effectively same front end, key scheme, encryption scheme, etc) with a modified transport/delivery and notification system and without the phone-number-as-an-identifier caveat that signal has.
Note: Sorry for the wall of text below.
As for what that modified transport layer is, it's routing all the messaging and data hosting over Oxen (https://oxen.io/) which is a cryptocurrency that serves as a decentralised short term / small size addressable data store and an onion router for those messages/data. As much as cryptocurrency=bad in a lot of cases, here it kinda makes sense as it's just an automated digital marketplace for data hosting and bandwidth with tooling wrapped around it to support privacy and anonymity preserving tools without relying on some hopefully benevolent dictator to run it.
As for who's backing it, same group that develops the Oxen, an Australian non-profit focused on privacy tech and bearing the same name (Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation). While Oxen is pay for use (messaging and all that has an on chain cost), it looks like the foundation is covering the costs of running Session for the foreseeable future. Given the nature of the project, it should eventually be possible for users to pay their own infra costs however that doesn't seem to be implemented yet.
It's pretty easy to use.
1. Install via F-droid or download from the web.
2. Basic cryptocurrency wallet style setup where your account is based on a randomly generated "recovery seed" phrase (string of words with equal bits of randomness as the private key which can be used to rebuild the private key on a new device).
3. Then you can share your "Session ID" which is basically just your public key or you can pay for a custom username which is addressed to your public key (you can set names for contacts after adding them so the username is mostly for ease of discoverability).
4. After that it's basically just Signal but where you can make and throw away accounts at the drop of a hat.
My main complaints are
1. that it's a bit slow on delivery
2. The onion routing half of decentralised storage + routing is still being implemented for Session as the project is very much WIP at this stage.
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My takeaway is that provided it can stick around, Session has potential to shore up where Signal falls short. Give it a year or two in the oven and I might recommend it as a daily driver for messaging.
Likewise for the OPTF and their goals in general. It looks like once Session is "fully implemented" they are looking at trying to expand the approach to a discord/slack/matrix competitor as well which could be interesting. As far as I can tell they are just a bunch of privacy nerds with a little bit of a cryptocurrency lean to them but they are doing good work.
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Tornado Cash and WHY privacy chains are important!?!
Lets kickstart with Oxen, an open source privacy tech blockchain with 2 working products; Sessions Messenger - (a fully anonymous encrypted messaging service) and Lokinet - (a cutting edge low-latency onion router) - which both utilize the Oxen Service Node network to safeguard user privacy and anonymity.
- Weekly Ask Ledger Anything - leave your questions here! Week of June 6
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Weekly Ask Ledger Anything thread - Leave Your Questions here! Week of May 9, 2022
The https://oxen.io/ community patiently waits for the integration of their Ledger app. Any idea on when that's going to happen?
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Weekly Dev Update 12/04/2022
Wallet3 RPC calls for Get Balance, Get Address and Export Keys https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1525
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Weekly Dev Update 15/02/2022
Removes macro and goto code in wallet2::import_outputs function https://github.com/oxen-io/oxen-core/pull/1516
What are some alternatives?
berty - Berty is a secure peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access, cellular data or trust in the network
session-desktop - Session Desktop - Onion routing based messenger
aTox - Reasonable Tox client for Android
lokinet-exit-provider - lokinet exit node webapp
qTox - qTox is a chat, voice, video, and file transfer IM client using the encrypted peer-to-peer Tox protocol.
session-android - A private messenger for Android.
bbs - Forum for discussing Internet censorship circumvention
lokinet-webrtc - lokinet webrtc demo with electron
toxic - A Tox-based instant messaging and video chat client
loki-network - Lokinet is an anonymous, decentralized and IP based overlay network for the internet.
libuvpp - Minimal Change of libUV for P2P Networking
session-pysogs - Python implementation of the Session community server