Encrypting Instant Messaging »
As you may recall, I settled on Trillian (Pro) not too long ago as my primary instant messaging client. Well, it always bothered me that Trillian wouldn't be quite as responsive as I'd like. The dang thing would just sit there when I clicked on it and tried to restore it from the system tray. More often than not, I'd get an error message of some kind when shutting down, saying that Trillian had a message display of some sort that wasn't responding.
It wasn't that this affected my usage - it really didn't, other than the occasional extra click to dismiss the error dialog. But it did settle somewhere into my brain and remind me on a fairly regular basis that I still wasn't quite happy with it. So I decided to try Gaim once again. I have to say that thus far, I'm pretty happy with the results. It's way more responsive than Trillian and it seems to have a smaller memory footprint to boot.
So it was with interest that I read this bit on encrypting IM protocols (thanks Rob). After reading, and dwelling on it for a day or so, I decided that I wasn't going to worry about encryption just yet. Naturally, life has a way of changing your plans. When I woke up yesterday morning I read this wonderful story telling me that AIM is declaring that messages are its territory. Slashdot reports that AOL says this may not be the case with IM.
My response? I installed the encryption. I haven't yet decided to drop conversations without encryption, mostly because I'm not sure of the interoperability of Gaim with other methods, but it's likely it will happen in the near future, or on any conversations that I don't want shared with the world. I'm perfectly able to share my information with the world when I'd like to do so, thank you very much, and this allows me to continue to make the choice for myself. If AIM decides to post an encrypted conversation of mine, so be it - but this ought to remove some of the reason that they might want to do so.
If you communicate with me via IM, please keep this in mind - encrypted communications may be a requirement at some point in the not-too-distant future.
