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Pidgin encryption in GNOME 2.22

While browsing through the roadmap for the next GNOME release (2.20) I continued on and spotted that there is a plan to add an encryption plugin for Pidgin in GNOME 2.22.

This is great news for anybody that values the security and privacy of their instant messaging passwords.

One of the common arguments made by the Gaim/Pidgin developers that by its very nature, an IM password was a throw-away commodity.  This may be true, but in Sun (and countless other companies) we have a unified username and password for all services, including IM.  Suddenly the plain-text password in your home directory looks less satisfactory.

Anyway, you can read more about the roadmap at live.gnome.org/RoadMap

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Pidgin encryption in GNOME 2.22”

  1. Chris Gerhard Says:
    June 11th, 2007 at 2:34 pm

    As of build 64 or so we the paswords stored in the gnome keyring on Solaris so no more plain text passwords in the home directory.

  2. lewiz Says:
    June 11th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    Yep, but this isn’t the “right way” of doing things. We need a method that will work for KDE, GNOME, OS X, Windows, etc. i.e. pluggable back-ends.

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