Free and secure alternative to Skype

PRISM has shown that services like Skype may have been accessible to the NSA and our privacy may have been violated. With the idea of ​​preserving our personal data, we devote a few minutes to find some free and secure alternative to Skype and other messaging services.

The revelations of Edward Snowden on PRISM or X-Keyscore have put on the table that government surveillance of Internet users is very real. Although statistics show that Americans prefer to sacrifice their privacy to contribute to security, many users who look askance at the cloud and to seek alternative services that ensure the privacy of your data (or at least put it somewhat more difficult to NSA). A few weeks ago we spend a few minutes reviewing some options that implement our own private cloud , let's follow this trail to talk about messaging and safe alternatives to Skype.

If we recall the main lines of the PRISM program of the NSA, the National Security Agency of the United States would have had access to the servers of Facebook, Microsoft or Google and, of course, this means that our conversations on Skype, Facebook chat or Google's Hangouts may have been exposed. In fact, while services like Skype are based on P2P use closed protocols and conversations are placed through its infrastructure. With the idea to disassociate ourselves from this kind of dynamic, let's take a look at several free alternatives to Skype with our communications that take so little safer:

TOX

TOX is a project that is in its infancy and promises us a free and secure alternative to Skype and other messaging services. The service is still under development but we can follow its evolution through all the code is accessible via GitHub , a project that aims to develop a client very similar to Skype video calls and chat we offer without having to pay from its use or to unlock additional features.

Cryptocat

Cryptocat is a private instant messaging service that works on web and, of course, is also an open source project.Thanks to Nadim Kobeissi , project leader, and the community of developers working on the project we have at our disposal a service that we can easily access using an add on Firefox or Google Chrome.

The service uses the protocol Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) to encrypt messages exchanged users in the client side and, as a curiosity, prepare arrival at Raspberry Pi and network infrastructure is hosted by the ISP Bahnhof whose data center is in a fallout shelter of the Cold War protected inside a mountain.

Mumble


Mumble is another open source project with which we can implement our own courier to study both voice communications to talk with our friends through chat. Mumble offers a VoIP system based free bearing in a client server and therefore requires that we have our own cloud infrastructure.

Since version 1.1 of the system, all communications are encrypted using TLS and although you may think that this service is intended for online games can be the foundation on which to develop a secure corporate communications without having to resort to a third party Skype or Google.

Jitsi
Jitsi is a cross-platform client (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and multiservice (supports Jabber, Facebook chat, Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk) that besides offering the possibility of using popular services on the network, also supports SIP and above it, offers some interesting features.

And what's so interesting Jitsi? This client offers the ability to encrypt our communications XMPP based communications and SIP, specifically allows us to use ZRTP and SDES / SRTP to encrypt voice communications using, for example, a call 1 to 1 on SIP or through our own XMPP messaging server (and if not we can use any XMPP server offering himself Jitsi).