[OTR-users] Automatically refresh session when receiving unreadable messag

Bits gsnqa6734n at snkmail.com
Mon May 5 12:56:11 EDT 2014


Jonas, thank you so much for coming up with that sequence list!
I often run into the same problem with OTR.
Or, I think it's the same problem - it's certainly the same symptoms.

This is really bothersome for convincing the people to use OTR.  Their
experience is that it randomly and silently fails from time to time.  They
find this annoying and the benefits using of strong encryption are not as
obvious to them, which makes using OTR a hard sale for me sometimes.

I'm using OTR 4.0 on Pidgin 2.10.9, but on Win 7, 8, and XP.
The people I communicate with are using similar setups on Windows boxes
and one on a Linux (Ubuntu or Mint)

--Bits


"Jonas otr-users-at-bcdf.eu |otr/Example Allow|"
<2qp2ux9jyt at sneakemail.com> writes:
>I'm using Pidgin 2.10.9 with OTR 4.0.0 on up to date Arch Linux.
>She is using Pidgin 2.10.7 with OTR 4.0.0 on Ubuntu.
>Thanks for your fast reply,
>Jonas
>Am 02.05.2014 23:34, schrieb Ian Goldberg:
>> On Fri, May 02, 2014 at 11:21:57PM +0200, Jonas wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm experiencing a rather annoying behavior which (in my humble
>opinion)
>>> should be easy to fix and might also affect other users.
>>>
>>> I'm using pidgin OTR with a friend who often just closes his laptop
>>> putting it to sleep with all his programs still open. The annoying
>>> scenario is as follows:
>>>
>>> 1. We begin a private conversation an write something.
>>>
>>> 2. My friend puts her laptop to sleep. This does not cause the private
>>> session to end.
>>>
>>> 3. I log off from pidgin closing the private session from my side. She
>>> is not notified since she is offline.
>>>
>>> 4. She opens her laptop again -- nothing changed for her.
>>>
>>> 5. I log in again. (You can exchange steps 4 and 5.)
>>>
>>> 6. She writes me a message. Because her pidgin thinks she still has a
>>> private session open it is sent encrypted. I just receive "the message
>>> is unread because you are not in a private conversation" (rough
>>> translation, my pidgin is not in English).
>>>
>>> 7. She doesn't even notice what she's sending me is unreadable. So
>until
>>> I don't manually refresh the session and ask her to resend her messages
>>> again she continues to send unreadable messages.
>>>
>>> In my opinion a solution to this issue would be the following:
>>>
>>> If a client receives an unreadable message due do a non-existing
>private
>>> session then:
>>> a) Update the session
>>> b) Notify the sender that the received message was unreadable
>>> c) (Senders side:) Resend the message
>>>
>>> I know that this might cause problems using multiple clients with OTR
>>> and XMPP. But for me -- as I'm only using one client -- it would
>greatly
>>> improve my user experience. By having something like this as an
>optional
>>> feature one could satisfy both groups of people.
>> 
>> If I understand your scenario correctly that's what used to happen in
>> pidgin-otr 3.x. I thought that behaviour didn't change in 4.x, but it
>> could be that, as you say, the interaction with the "don't go insane
>> when people log in more than once" feature of pidgin-otr 4.x could have
>> interacted with it.
>> 
>> What OS, pidgin, and pidgin-otr versions are each of you using?
>> 
>> - Ian
>> _______________________________________________
>> OTR-users mailing list
>> OTR-users at lists.cypherpunks.ca
>> http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-users
>> 
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