[guardian-dev] Interesting project opportunity: Ricochet on Android

Nathan of Guardian nathan at guardianproject.info
Thu Aug 6 13:51:07 EDT 2015


If you haven't heard of Ricochet, it is a new-ish peer-to-peer messaging
system that works over Tor Hidden Services. It is similar to TorChat,
but seems to work better, is design better, and in general, the team
behind it has done a better job engaging with the Tor community.

https://ricochet.im/
https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet

Now, of course, I'm interested in bringing this service to Android, and
there a few ways to do so. Here's the open issue on Github discussing
this:
https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/issues/115

The first is to use QT for Android, and cross-compile the entire
codebase into an APK. I've started on this, and it is a bit of a chore,
but it should work technically. I think what you'll end up with though
is not a great user experience.

The second option is for us to support Ricochet within ChatSecure. We
have a highly extensible protocol plug-in layer that we have never
really exploited properly, and I think we can easily plug the Ricochet
protocol into that. You would even get OTR and OTRDATA running on top of
it, which would be pretty cool.

To do this, we either need the Ricochet C++ code to be turned into a JNI
library, or we need someone to implement the Ricochet protocol in Java:
https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet/blob/master/doc/protocol.md#contact-request-channel

This is really just an idea I am throwing out there, perhaps worthy of a
hackathon effort, and I have no real idea where it could go. I am still
a huge fan of XMPP+OTR+Tor (aka "XMPPSecure+Private") but I would also
like to see the UI and Usability we have created with ChatSecure
leverage into other great potential new protocols like Ricochet and Pond
(oi, that is another project - PondLib Go-to-Android port!).

Btw, if you want to reach me on Ricochet, I am at:
ricochet:z3apuhaum7wxrpmw


-- 
  Nathan of Guardian
  nathan at guardianproject.info


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