
WhatsApp on your computer: Pidgin plugin - vikas0380
https://github.com/davidgfnet/whatsapp-purple
======
giovannibajo1
Does pidgin still save your password in plain text (or base64-ized) in a
configuration file in your home? I haven't used them in years because of this,
and we also banned it in our company to avoid mistakes.

~~~
lucian1900
libpurple saving passwords in plain text is the correct decision. If it did
encrypt them, it would also have to hold the key, so it would only add a false
sense of security.

The only improvement would be a hardware-backed secret storage mechanism, but
those aren't exactly ubiquitous.

~~~
giovannibajo1
It isn't. The correct decision would be to save the password in the operating
system keychain, like Empathy does (or Messages on Mac, or name any others).
Browsers also use keychains. On Windows, you can use the Crypto API to obtain
an intermediate level of security.

~~~
tszming
>> Browsers also use keychains

Google will disagree with you: chrome://settings/passwords

~~~
Bakkot
I'm still required to unlock my keychain to view the passwords (on OS X).

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salient
It would be nice if Whatsapp, which is so popular, would help make its users a
lot more secure by adopting end-to-end encryption, perhaps like what
TextSecure v2 is using.

Getting people to use services with proper encryption is going to be a very
slow process unless we convince/pressure the big ones to do it.

~~~
sturmeh
So like Telegram, which is basically the same app but nobody uses it?
([http://telegram.org/](http://telegram.org/))

~~~
m-app
"Very secure. We are based on a new protocol, MTProto, built by our own
specialists from scratch, with security in mind."

I do not think that is such a great idea. I still vote Threema:
[https://threema.ch/](https://threema.ch/)

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thomasahle
This is awesome! Must have taken a fair bit of hacking to get working, given
WhatsApp's policies.

Does anyone know if there are mobile apps based on Pidgin? Pidgin/Purple
solved the multi-chat-client problem so well for the desktop, I'd love it to
do the same on mobile.

~~~
X4
Yes there is a pidgin web-client, I can't recall the URL though. Sorry.

~~~
vikas0380
pidgin web client

[https://code.google.com/p/webpidgin/](https://code.google.com/p/webpidgin/)

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amjd
If anyone's interested in hacking, there are a couple of unofficial APIs:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913300)

[https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI](https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI)

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govindkabra31
will this work on adium?

~~~
Axsuul
Yea, those of us on OS X need something like this

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rfnslyr
Pidgin is great. I have all my services hooked up to it: Aim/FB(when i had
it)/Multiple Steam accounts/GTalk etc. Really great light weight chat client.
Just wish there was a way to get Skype contacts on it.

~~~
Attic
There actually is a way, you can use Skype4Pidgin. However this requires you
to have skype running, but you are able to chat with your skype contacts
through Pidgin. I do have to note that I've used this with Finch (also uses
the purple library) and I've had one incident that I was talking to one person
and one of my messages was mysteriously sent to a group chat instead of that
one person. I've only had that happen to me once and I've not had that with
Pidgin.

Here's the link:
[http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/](http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/)

~~~
dewiz
Unfortunately that will stop to work soon

[http://blogs.skype.com/2013/11/06/feature-evolution-and-
supp...](http://blogs.skype.com/2013/11/06/feature-evolution-and-support-for-
the-skype-desktop-api/)

~~~
meowface
Whatever happened to Steve Ballmer screaming about developers?

Unfortunately it seems like over the years, companies have been providing
fewer and fewer hooks into their products and services for developers to take
advantage of.

