 Tor develops its own anonymous IM tool to hide chat from spying eyes
Tor develops its own anonymous IM tool to hide chat from spying eyes

                      
                      
          The Tor Foundation is moving forward with a plan to provide its own instant messaging service. Called the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle, the tool will allow people to communicate in real time while preserving anonymity by using chat servers concealed within Tor’s hidden network.
In planning since last July—as news of the National Security Agency’s broad surveillance of instant messaging traffic emerged—the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) should be available in experimental builds by the end of March, based on a roadmap published in conjunction with the Tor Project’s Winter Dev meeting in Iceland.
TIMB will connect to instant messaging servers configured as Tor “hidden services” as well as to commercial IM services on the open Internet.
The effort, which is funded by an anonymous donor organization, was originally called Attentive Otter. To ensure the anonymity of the user, TIMB will force all instant messaging traffic through the Tor network, regardless of whether it’s aimed at a server on the Tor network or not. TIMB will be based on Instantbird, an open source instant messaging tool which is itself based on Mozilla’s XULrunner cross-platform runtime environment.

          
                      
                  