Worried about the privacy of your calls and text messages to friends and family? Well, BitTorrent is publicly releasing a version of Bleep, its new peer-to-peer messaging system aimed at eliminating any potential snooping middlemen.
BitTorrent, the San Francisco-based company behind the peer-to-peer protocol of the same name, began pre-alpha, invite-only testing of Bleep in late July. On Wednesday, senior product manager Jaehee Lee announced in a blog post that the company is now rolling out alpha versions of the chat client for Windows, Mac and Android. Bleep is available for download both through BitTorrent and the Google Play Store.
“Every message sent through Bleep is fully encrypted, end to end, and only stored locally on your device, ensuring privacy with every message,” Lee said. “Users can also easily delete their encrypted message history, leaving no trace of conversation behind.”
Encrypted Invitations
Bleep works by creating an encrypted, private key for any newly registered user. A public key is then derived from that private key and used to enable direct, private communications between two devices.
By employing a decentralized lookup service known as a distributed hash table (DHT), Bleep allows users to find the IP addresses of their online contacts and connect directly to them.
“When a user adds someone to her contact list, an invitation is sent to that user that asks if he would allow her to see that he is online and able to receive messages,” wrote Farid Fadaie, head of product for Bleep. “Once two users have each other’s public key, they can find each other’s IP and port on the DHT and establish a direct connection (or via a relay server, if the network condition doesn’t allow direct connections). This invitation is encrypted in a way that only the user who is meant to receive it can decrypt and read it.”
‘Some Bugs to Work Out’
In his blog post, Lee acknowledged that Bleep has “some known issues and bugs to work out.” Android users without unlimited data plans, for example, will have to set the app to Wi-Fi only as the alpha version currently is both battery- and data-intensive. And Bleep users can currently move their accounts from desktops to mobile devices, but not the other way around.
At the moment, Bleep does not yet enable offline communications either. That means both parties have to be online to exchange messages or photos, or participate in group chats.
To sign up for Bleep, a user can either verify his identity with an e-mail address or phone number, or he can stay incognito by using a QR code or direct public key to be added to another user’s contact list.
In his post, Lee noted that Bleep’s official logo was inspired by “the simplicity of a folded note.”
“You write a message, fold it up, and hand it to your friend,” Lee wrote. “It is fast and efficient. There is no middleman. The image of a folded note is designed to be a symbol of speed, privacy, and peace of mind in the digital age.”
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