[guardian-dev] BitTorrent Bleep - another secure/private chat app

[Josh Steiner]

Looks like BitTorrent is getting into the private communications game:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6338417/bittorrent-bleep-secure-chat-app-public-alpha-released

"Bleep keeps messages encrypted for their entire ride, so
theoretically only their sender and receiver should be able to see
them."

...

"Bleep avoids that by sending its communications directly between the
people who are talking, rather than relying on an intermediary. That
said, there's still a matter of making that connection between two
people in the first place, as they have to figure out where on the
internet one another actually is. That's handled with a traditionally
BitTorrent type of network that distributes the information across the
phones and computers of people hooked into Bleep. BitTorrent says that
this information is encrypted so that your computer's digital location
won't be seen by anyone but the party you're actually looking for, and
no one but the receiving party should even know who you're looking for
either. Altogether, BitTorrent says that it would be "practically
impossible" to gather metadata on who's talking to who."