It’s been a while since I read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (and I definitely recommend it), and I didn’t really care about the whole wiretapping thing either. I was just the average, crypto-apathetic user, who didn’t bother struggling, since “I’ve got nothing to hide” and “that’s how it rolls.”

I don’t store passwords I actually use anywhere, but I naively believe that the applications I use store them appropriately. I pick secure connections whenever I can, but I don’t bother to check if the warning about the authenticity of a certificate is actually relevant.

Considering how I don’t use social media for actual communication for most of it, the only point where I actually feel the need for privacy are Google Talk and IRC, both of which are supposedly secured with SSL. Then again, who knows what’s stored on the servers out of my communications?

Anyway, a while back I read somewhere about this initiative about a twitter alternative based on the decentralized tech of torrents and bitcoin. After a short search I managed to find it. It’s called twister and it was surprisingly easy to install. No missing dependencies, no obscure libraries I need to find.

It was a bit scary when after creating my user at first it returned errors, but that was only due to the time required for propagation. So if you happen to use twister (and why wouldn’t you give it a try), add @valerauko. (Picking that username made me wonder what’s the point at all.)

Thing is, on the twister profile page there was a field for a “Tox ID”. I had no idea what Tox was, but the internet told me it’s an anon-made messenger intended as a replacement for Skype. Now this one was tough, but after suffering through the various dependencies, I managed to get both uTox and Venom working. I think for now I’ll just stick with the latter. Not that anyone I know actually uses it…