
Our XMPP services at DuckDuckGo - dn2k
https://dukgo.com/blog/xmpp-services-at-duckduckgo
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casca
TL;DR: DuckDuckGo, a search-engine known for privacy, has a public XMPP
service that promises the same level of privacy as their searches. They also
have an XMPP chat-bot that will respond to queries over XMPP, but this is less
interesting.

I personally am a fan of DDG and use it as my primary search engine. I do wish
they'd change their name as it makes it difficult to recommend to non-
technical people.

~~~
plainOldText
I agree the name is not that great – I know others might disagree – But I once
told a friend of mine about DDG, to which he replied: "DuckDuckGo? I would
never use a search engine named like that."

I know it's shallow to judge a product/service by its name, but for most
people hearing the name for the first time counts as an initial encounter with
the product/service, and since that can leave an impression, it matters a lot.

~~~
omaranto
What search engine did that person use? Altavista, maybe, if it still exists?
all the others have silly names: Google, Bing, Dogpile, Blekko, Ask Jeeves,
...

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scotchmi_st
Sorry if this is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone could
explain the technical reasons why, with minimal modification, we couldn't just
replace all electronic messaging systems from SMS to email with xmpp, and
forevermore live in a magical fantasy world where email headers, text fees and
security concerns don't exist? I mean, it has these things going for it-

1\. SSL/TLS embedded in the standard.

2\. Easy to set up OTR encryption, (as well as any other standard I imagine).

3\. Messages are "pushed" to clients, rather than "pulled".

4\. The standard is simple, and servers like Prosody are super-easy to
implement (unlike Exim).

5\. There are plenty of clients already available. Admittedly it's not
something I've researched much, but I doubt it'd take all that much to get
Adium or whatever to work like a simple email client, (but with xmpp).

I'm aware of all of the social reasons why such a thing may not work, but I'd
be interested to know if it were just a question of getting people to adopt
it, were it to exist.

~~~
TylerE
Because push doesn't scale.

~~~
MattJ100
Care to elaborate?

~~~
TylerE
Server has to keep tabs on all clients, rather than being polled.

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shmerl
Can anyone please clearly explain what exactly did Google do regarding XMPP?
Just stopped using XMPP protocol in their Hangout client? Or disabled XMPP
federation on their server? The later doesn't seem to be the case - I can
still communicate with the contacts from Google server (though they don't use
the Hangout client).

~~~
Macha
Hangout does not support XMPP, at all. Google Talk still does, but the Google
Talk Android app was replaced by Hangouts, they're slowly replacing Talk with
Hangout in Gmail, and it's quite likely Talk will be shut down altogether
given Google's track record.

~~~
shmerl
I.e. Hangout uses a different server than Google Talk (not just a different
client), right?

~~~
Macha
Yes. But as far as I know, the GTalk client in Gmail is able to talk to
Hangout users, but random XMPP clients are not.

~~~
shmerl
I see, so basically Google made a completely non XMPP service (Hangout), and
made a bridge between Google Talk (XMPP service) and Hangout. So users of
Hangout are cut off from the XMPP network (except for the Google Talk part of
it).

So if Google plans to kill Google Talk server and force all its users to
switch to Hangout, it means all Google users will be cut off from the XMPP
network. Way to go Google, on the road to evilness.

------
lucian1900
Sadly, most of the people I would talk to are either on Google or Facebook and
neither supports XMPP federation. Where's my federated client-independent IM
future?

~~~
MattJ100
While Google's recent moves are indeed a backward step, the only way we can
fight them is by having open alternatives like this available to people, and
by making them as attractive as possible.

There are many practical reasons that people and organisations would rather be
in control of their communications, so XMPP (or something, the protocol
doesn't matter) is here to stay. The challenge is making that open network
worth the big players' time, they currently don't seem to think it is.

~~~
malandrew
Is it possible to set up my DNS records so that I can use DDG XMPP for chat
instead of Google XMPP, while still using Google Apps for GMail?

~~~
pepr
You can do that in principle (XMPP servers for the given domain are stored in
SRV records, e.g. for my domain praus.net, it's _jabber._tcp.praus.net) but I
can't find anywhere that the DDG XMPP server supports custom domains. So you
can do it but I think not with DDG just yet.

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anoncow
What will you do if they make encryption illegal?

A reason why there reportedly are backdoors in skype is because of government
requirements.

For eg. see this news article about India asking Skype to setup local servers
in India

[http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infra...](http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-05-20/infrastructure/39391625_1_internet-
telephony-law-enforcement-servers)

~~~
jmillikin
Who is "they"? Your city council? Your nation's legislature? The commie-nazi-
jewish-muslim-reptilian cabal who puts radios in your teeth?

No major government will forbid effective encryption, because citizens are far
more afraid of other citizens than they are of the government. That's why
governments request backdoors, or pass legislation permitting warrantless
searches.

Think of it this way: your city council will never be able to pass a law
forbidding people from locking their car door, because everyone with a car
would be screaming about theft. But they could easily pass a law requiring car
manufacturers to provide a master key to law enforcement.

~~~
anoncow
This makes sense. By 'they', I meant governments. I always wondered why no
mail/im providers support pgp or similar encryption. This means there never
will be such a service, since the only master key would be with the end user.

~~~
jmillikin
Webmail providers don't provide PGP support because it is not possible to
securely implement PGP for webmail. All web-based interfaces are inherently a
proxy through a third party, so if you want to read your encrypted mail on the
web, you must give your webmail provider the decryption key.

Given this, it's better for webmail providers to not pretend to support secure
mail.

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claudius
So they have a public XMPP server and a bot that gives out the instant answers
in their search – I somewhat fail to see how this is groundbreaking or even
interesting in any way?

Sure, the bot is nice to play with, but somewhat cumbersome in the long term
for me. So why is this great? :)

~~~
prg318
I can see this being utilized by Google users who still need to use XMPP. With
Google removing XMPP support from their messaging services, users will need to
find a new XMPP server, and DuckDuckGo fits the bill.

~~~
HyprMusic
The convenience of Google talk supporting XMPP, for me anyway, was the ability
to talk to other people already using Google Talk through the XMPP protocol,
and the ability to use XMPP clients.

~~~
davidw
While we're talking about externalities, this is what's known as the network
effect, or positive network externalities.

The value is not that someone has an XMPP server, the value is in having an
XMPP server that everyone uses.

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MattJ100
The XMPP network needs more independent servers run by trusted entities, so I
welcome this very much (I've been trusting DuckDuckGo with my searches for
some time now).

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jweir
This feature is great. A bit of a trojan horse - I will keep DuckDuckGo open
now and search it before trying that "other" search engine.

The goodies (<https://duckduckgo.com/goodies>) are really cool. Although they
do not seem to consistently work in the chat client. Some do, some do not.

~~~
crazedpsyc
A lot of those plugins are written in client-side Javascript, so the bot can't
(easily) work with those.

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shared4you
Google also has a chat bot: guru@googlelabs.com . Just add it to your contacts
list and you can query it over XMPP.

~~~
dn2k
this is not exactly the point.. the point is that DDG gives you now a free and
"we don't track users" XMPP server that support federation...

~~~
BitMastro
Not to undervalue DDG, but the same service has been offered for years by
those servers <http://xmpp.net/>

A "we don't track users" XMPP server?? Is this a thing?

~~~
sukuriant
In a world where tracking is the norm, we need to be reminded when places
/aren't/ tracking

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brunoqc
Is it accessible on the 443 port like GTalk?

~~~
jaryd
Actually no, but this is something that we are discussing. We see the value in
providing the service on this port, and want to accommodate all users.

Thanks for the feedback, and feel free to hit me up with questions (if you
have any) at my $username at duckduckgo.com :)

EDIT: Or, hop on Freenode and chat with us in #duckduckgo

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MMXII
One of the biggest strengths of gchat is the integration with gmail, and why
they have so much traction.

It makes less sense to chat on a free service that no one is using, but maybe
some people will use it if there were a DDG email service.

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pepr
Does anybody know if this supports custom domains or just the domain assigned
by DDG? They seem to support only dukgo.com

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Hontano
X

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ausjke
I must agree that duckduckgo is too long and not cute, a big turn off for
people like me, bad naming in my opinion, and it matters a _lot_

plus, duck goes slowly and unstably, again, ugly naming.

