Tor Project ceases development of own Messenger software

The Tor Project has announced that it will stop developing its own off-the-record chat software, also known as the Tor Messenger. It gives several reasons for the decision, including lack of resources.

It writes that due to the lack of job requests and bug reports had to remain and that there had never been an external audit of the software. In addition, the adoption of the chat software was low and the development of InstantBird had ceased . The Tor Messenger was based on this software. The Tor Project writes that Mozilla wants to add the InstantBird chat functions to Thunderbird and that this was a good time to re-evaluate the Messenger project.
The third reason is that a centralized server infrastructure can give metadata price, allowing for example the contacts of users. There would be no work-arounds, according to the team.
The Tor Messenger has never left the beta phase since the first release in 2015 . The software used otr-messaging and supported various protocols, such as Jabber, IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter and Yahoo. The communication was encrypted via the Tor network. The last beta release came out in September
The Tor Project refers existing users to the CoyIM service and to a series messages about safe chatting by the EFF. The American civil rights organization no longer provides advice via its Secure Messaging Scorecard for secure chat services, because it is insufficient for complex information.