so now it's time to talk about a subject that is really important on tails and that is secure instant messaging.
instant messaging is not like email, it's not like text or sending stuff back and forth on a website.
instant messaging is what you probably use every day.
most of the texting we do these days on our phones is a form of instant messaging.
using something like imessage or using the frameworks offered by android, you're engaging in an ecosystem that allows back and forth instant communication, but in a secure way.
now, there are a lot of popular instant messaging platforms that have existed on the internet for a long time.
tools like jabber or aol chat, if you recall that have been really popular, but they did not offer very good encryption or security.
these messages were likely wide open to the wider internet.
anyone able to snoop on the traffic could most likely see them in plain text.
obviously with email, we have options like pgp, but pgp is slow and for instant messaging, it probably is not a viable way to send and receive communications.
any asymmetrical encryption like that is going to be way too slow for something like a stream with instant messaging.
so what options do we have with tails?
well, let's hop over to our tails desktop and take a look.
so here on the tails desktop, there is one pre- installed, actually two now pre- installed applications for instant messaging.
the 1st one i wanted to talk about that we covered earlier in this course is onion share.
onion share is an application provided by the tor project, and they do actually have a chat feature in here.
so we can start a chat server very simply in onion share, and then we can just give someone the link to that server so that they can chat back and forth with us.
now this history isn't shared.
it gets deleted when you close tor and it's over the encryption of the tor network, meaning it is encrypted along transit and generally a very safe protocol to use.
so this is a great tool for one- off chatting, and i think it's gaining popularity in the online space, but it hasn't been a standard for a long time, so it's not as widely used.
what is more widely used, and it comes pre- installed on tails is pigeon.
pigeon is a chat client that allows you to use different im accounts on the back end.
so if we wanted to add an im account, we can see the different protocols and we can make sure we sign in with that information.
so you would have to go to a 3rd party tool to actually sign up for these accounts.
now, this course is not going over the complexities of setting up instant messaging accounts and how to make sure they're secure, but it's important to know that pigeon is pre- installed.
and another software that is available, we are just navigating to the site here to show you the documentation, is called dyno.
and dyno with omimo, it's their security protocol, uses xmpp or jabber protocol for decentralized communication, but encrypts it.
so this is a really useful tool that's gaining popularity as well.
and you can actually set up dyno pretty easily entails by just going to their download page and you can check out the distribution packages or just straight download it.
this is like any other service.
so check out their website.
it's just dyno, i believe, what was that?
dyno.
im.
and you can go to their github page to see information about their available packages and install it very quickly.
pretty easy to set up an account.
i'll be making a separate guide.
i'll attach a guide to this video on how to do this, but we're not going to go through all of the steps in this video.
just wanted to make sure you were introduced to dyno and omimo and how to actually use those together for encryption and chatting.
if you have any questions on this or would like a deeper dive, let me know.
otherwise, definitely check out the discord.
i think there is a secure instant messaging channel specifically for communication and thoughts around that.
as always, thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one.