The Tor Foundation is moving forward with a plan to provide its own instant messaging service. Called the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle, the tool will allow people to communicate in real time while preserving anonymity by using chat servers concealed within Tor’s hidden network.
In planning since last July—as news of the National Security Agency’s broad surveillance of instant messaging traffic emerged—the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) should be available in experimental builds by the end of March, based on a roadmap published in conjunction with the Tor Project’s Winter Dev meeting in Iceland.
TIMB will connect to instant messaging servers configured as Tor “hidden services” as well as to commercial IM services on the open Internet. (more)