[OTR-users] Happy 10th anniversary!

[Ian Goldberg]

Today is the tenth anniversary of the very first release of OTR!

Thanks so much to everyone who has helped develop, deploy, and support
OTR over the years!

The original README is below, for historical humour value.  ;-)

   - Ian


                 Off-the-Record plugin for GAIM
		    v0.10, Oct 26, 2004

INSTALLATION

To compile, edit the Makefile to change the GAIM_SOURCE variable to
point to the Gaim source tree.  You will also need to install the
development libraries for GTK and GDK.  Then you should be able to
type 'make' and produce otr-plugin.so, which you can load as a 
plugin into Gaim.

USAGE

The first time you use the plugin, it will generate you a private 
key.  The plugin will not get involved in conversations until you send
your buddy a message that says "[enc=on]".  This will initiate a secure
session with your buddy.  Once the session is established, both you and
your buddy will see "[enc=on!]" displayed and the rest of the
conversation will be encrypted.

If you see a public key for a buddy for the first time, the fingerprint 
is displayed for you to check.  For the future, all conversations with
that user will be carried out encrypted by default.

NOTES

This software is still in early status, so there are many bugs and
issues.  Here are some of the issues:

* We are in the middle of porting the plugin to gaim 1.0; if you are
  using that version, you should include -DGAIM_10 in the CFLAGS, but
  there are currently some problems loading the plugin.  The latest
  version of Gaim that we tested with is 0.64.

* Error handling is very poor, most incorrect values for the protocol
  will cause an assertion failure (sorry).  Most importantly, if your 
  buddy goes offline and loses session state, your conversation will
  afterwards crash.

* The interface to encrypted conversations isn't identified specially
  by Gaim, so it's possible that you may think a conversation is
  encrypted when it's not.  

* Some differences with the paper: we use Blowfish encryption instead of 
  AES since OpenSSL doesn't support AES.  Also, we have not implemented
  the automatic detection of the OTR plugin in your buddies.

* In the future, there will be a way to import, export, and otherwise
  manage buddy keys.

* There are probably other bugs.

So beware before using this, since it likely won't be long before your
Gaim will crash.  Please let us know if you are interested in having a
more usable plugin, if you have any suggestions or find any additional
problems not listed here.  Also, if you can help us port this to other
IM clients (e.g. iChat or Trillian), we would be happy to work with you.

Nikita Borisov and Ian Goldberg, otr at cypherpunks.ca