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It was confirmed by The Tor Project last year that it was working on an anonymous instant messenger which will enable users to have “off-the-record” chats courtesy of the secure browsing system that Tor is known around the world for. After more than a year Tor’s anonymous instant messenger has finally been released albeit in beta. It’s based on InstantBird, an instant messaging client that was developed in the Mozilla community.

Tor Messenger is a cross-platform client that promises to be “secure by default” as it sends all of its traffic over the Tor secure browsing network, it has support for multiple transport networks including but not limited to IRC, Google Talk, Jabber (XMPP) and many others. Tor Messenger enables off-the-record messaging automatically and features a simply graphical user interface that’s localized in many languages.

The team looked at a number of messaging clients during the development phase and believes that Instantbird was the “pragmatic choice” because not only does it transport protocols written in memory-safe languages but also has a GUI and supports multiple natural languages. Instantbird is also backed by an active and vibrant developer community.

A beta version of the Tor Messenger has now been released, it’s available for Windows, Linux and OS X. Future updates are promised after usability and security related feedback is gained from the beta release. Download files and install instructions are available via the official website.

Filed in Computers..

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