Hello, I use Ricochet and I quite like it.
Unfortunately, I use it with a workflow of "log in ricochet, check if the person I want to talk to is online, talk to them, exit ricochet". That's because I don't like my real-time presense information being leaked to all the random contacts I might have. In all the various crappy messaging protocols I've used in the past (MSN, Skype, etc.) there is this "appear offline" functionality that some people enjoy. The usual end result is that your buddies don't know if you are actually online or offline, but you can message people and usually people can message you and you can yourself choose whether to answer (and leak presense) or stay mute. Of course, all the above protocols are server-based and they usually achieve the "appear offline" functionality with the help of a server that caches messages. OTOH, Ricochet is serverless and IIUC is not interested in running any sort of services (yet). However, even with the current model of Ricochet you can have some sort of "appear offline" functionality. This could be done if you don't enable your hidden service, but you still connect to your friend's hidden services to speak to them if you want to (since connecting to a friend's hidden service establishes a duplex channel). I guess the next question is "if you are 'appear offline', how do you know which of your friend's are online"? In theory you could do that by just connecting unauthenticated to their onion address and ricochet port and checking if it's open. Of course, this way your friends would know that some sketchy "appear offline" person is probing them, which makes it weirder security-wise. Alternatively, when in "appear offline" mode you don't probe all your buddies, but you can select a buddy of yours and check if you can message him. If their hidden service is online, you message him, Otherwise, bad luck. This approach should leak no information but it's the crappiest UX ever. What else could we do here? FWIW, in both approaches above, your buddies would not be able to message you while you are "appear offline". This is sad, because MSN and Skype make this possible through their completely broken design, and that's what users would expect from Ricochet as well. To achieve that in Ricochet, some sort of server will need to be introduced that can handle state for offline user and "appear offline" users. This server would store encrypted messages for offline users or run an actually secure presense protocol (e.g. DP5). However, I understand that the Ricochet development group is not interested in server-based architectures so I'm not going to focus on that for now. Or we should just make a combo package of pond and Ricochet, where pond is used when your buddies are offline........ In any case, I'm interested in more solutions to the presense problem for Ricochet because it's really annoying me! Cheers! _______________________________________________ Messaging mailing list [email protected] https://moderncrypto.org/mailman/listinfo/messaging
