Yesterday’s keynote by Holger Krekel at Europython 2013 about peer-to-peer computing in the wake of the recent happenings surrounding NSA, GCHQ and other members of the so-called “intelligence community” resulted in my stumbling about two tools I haven’t heard before:
Crypho
The first is Crypho, which Holger mentioned in his talk and which is basically Crypto.cat but for the enterprise. It offers end-to-end encryption similar to Crypto.cat but it persists communications and accounts and therefor makes team-collaboration easier. The structure is also different with all communications linked to a so-called “space”. Such a space can then contain chats, notes and files accessible to your team. Right from the get-go you have to use two-factor auth, which is awesome. What is missing right now, though, is mobile integration, but according to the FAQ the status is “not yet”, so this should be a non-issue eventually.
Crypho is in beta right now and during that phase free. I haven’t seen any pricing announcements but I’d assume that the final product won’t be that cheap ;-)
Threema
The other tool is Threema, which feels like an end-to-end encrypted version of MMS available for Android and iOS. It adds the twist that you can mark a contact as trusted by scanning their account IDs, which is supposed to proof that you are close by. Except for the obvious problem of adoption Threema has one big downside for me right now:
Group chat is not yet available in the current version, but it is planned for a future version.
Threema FAQ
The app costs around 1.60€ depending on what platform you are.
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