Secure chat with cryptocat

With some of the events in the news lately of your privacy being spied upon not only by criminals but by your own government, keeping your conversations private even if you have nothing to hide is your right no matter what you are told. In this entry I will discuss a program that will allow you to chat with others at the same time be secured and encrypted. The nice part of this program is that it is done via your web browser or if you have a mac then there is a program that can be installed and run.

First off like every program there may be bugs so keep up to date, nothing is truly secure forever. What may be secure today with changes in technology tomorrow it may not be. Sorry to burst your bubble but that is the way of technology. So now for the program.

The program is called cryptocat. There are two options one is a plugin for most main stream browsers, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. There is also a program you can run on your modern mac. The site to get the plugin or program is https://crypto.cat/ at least for now that is, it may change so do a web search to find it if the link does not work. You can also set up a cryptocat server so you have even more control on your chat exchanges. It has a feel of a IRC chat client because you define your user name and room name in real time so it can change as needed. There are some predefined rooms if you wish, quite interesting ones as well. There is a lot of documentation on the site so I will leave you to look it over as you should for any security software to see if it will work for you.

Installing is quite easy and fast. Open your Firefox, Chrome or Safari browser and go to the cryptocat web site. It will be a https link so if is not then look again for the link. It should have selected the proper plugin for your browser if not then you may want to see if any java settings are causing issues. After you have downloaded and installed the plugin and restarted your browser you should be ready to start.

Click on the icon that looks like an 8bit Cat. A dialog box will open that will give you field for conversation name and nickname. Enter a conversation name and a nick name you want to be for this chat session and press connect and your ready to go in a few moments. Secure and encrypted between you and others.

That’s it and that simple..

Also please donate to them so they can keep up the work and keep it secure.