A quick thanks to Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte for briefly discussing BitWise in their Security Now Podcast from May 18th. Did I mention that Steve recommended BitWise for secure IM? Steve's discussion actually reveals a bit of "behind the scenes," in that it was Steve Gibson who prodded us to add the NAT traversal technologies last year. So, thanks to Steve both for the prod and the nod!
Here's an excerpt:
I know the author, I’ve interacted with him, in fact I’ve worked with him to improve his NAT traversal technology so that it works a lot better than it did before. It really – this guy’s a neat guy. It’s cross-platform Mac, Linux, and Windows. And it just looked, you know, if you’re looking for something that isn’t a huge bullseye, that isn’t the same sort of target that MSN and AIM and Yahoo! and Google are, where you want to do point-to-point chat and not run through a third-party server – oh, and everything is encrypted. So it’s very strongly encrypted chat. It’s what I would recommend.
I would also recommend in return Steve's podcasts, which are informative and interesting. Check out the Security Now Podcast Site or, if you're interested, the transcript of the Podcast that discusses BitWise.
Great! It's always nice to see BitWise get a bit of publicity.
While reading the transcript, Leo and Steve appear to disagree with one another:
While talking about BitWise IM, Steve says:
"There is a very good, very secure chat client called BitWise IM", and, in another place, "So it’s very strongly encrypted chat"
But yet, when discussing closed vs open source, Leo says:
"Which is why PGP was open – I wouldn’t trust any encryption program that wasn’t open source because you need to know what they’ve put in there."
Yet Leo still says he uses BitWise IM.
I just found that interesting...
Yup. The Security Now podcast is how I found out about BitWise IM. Tried the free version and bought the Plus version.
I suppose the discrepancy mention above by 'yelo' is just part of Leo and Steve having an un-scripted conversation. I don't doubt that Leo uses BitWise IM for its encrypted security, and he probably uses various open-source security products for encrypting other things.