Okay.
So now that we know how to use emails to communicate on the darknet privately and anonymously, the
other method of communication that you might want to use is instant messaging.
Now, when it comes to instant messaging, just like everything we spoke about so far, there are a
number of applications that we can use to do this, such as WhatsApp and Viber for phones and Skype
for desktops and phones.
And again, similar to everything we spoke about so far, a lot of these apps are not private and not
secure.
So a lot of them log what you do, they track what you do, they track your messages.
They track the users that you talk to, communicate with.
Some of them have permissions to listen on your mic and the list goes on.
Not only that, even the apps that claim that they use encryption and they are private such as WhatsApp.
We don't really know how this is implemented.
We can't see the code.
So there is even rumors that the end to end encryption in WhatsApp is not 100% secure.
It's not 100% end to end, and Facebook might be able to read the messages that get sent.
Now you'll face this issue with everything that is owned by one specific company, because a lot of
these companies don't share the code used on their programs.
So at the end of the day, you will just have to trust them.
All this aside, all of these applications might be vulnerable to exploits.
And we all heard about the WhatsApp vulnerability that affected all smartphones in which hackers could
hack into any phone by simply calling the phone.
And you won't even need to answer the call and you'll get hacked.
Check out the link in the resources for more information about this vulnerability.
But this is just an example on how these apps can be dangerous.
And again, putting all of this to the side, even if the apps are 100% secure and even if they are
100% private, these apps are installed on operating systems that are not secure and private, such
as iOS, Android, Windows and so on.
And we spoke about how all of these operating systems log data and track their users.
Therefore, if you want to protect your privacy and anonymity, it's a better idea to, first of all,
use an operating system that is more private than other operating systems such as Thales.
This will solve the problem of the operating system and then use a messaging service that is more private
and the messaging app that is more private.
So we're already using Thales and we know how to do that.
So we have the first part of the problem solved.
The next thing that we want to do is to use an instant messaging service that is more private.
And to do this, we're going to use X NPP.
This is a free and open protocol that is not owned by anybody.
So it's not controlled by a single company.
It is decentralized.
So anyone, even you can go and create your own server and use that to communicate with other x NPP
servers.
We can also enhance its security by using OTR and we'll talk about that later on.
And this is a widely used method of communication on the Darknet.
Therefore, it is very important to learn how it works.
So in this lecture, I'm going to show you how to create an X NPP account, and then we'll see how we
can improve its security using OTR in the next lectures.
Now, like I said, X NPP is decentralized, so anyone can run their own server and you can even use
your own server to set up an account.
So right here I have a list of public x NPP servers.
I'm going to include the link of this in the resources.
Now, as you can see, there is a lot of servers that you can use.
You can think of these as email providers.
So each one of them will allow you to create an account.
And once you create an account, you can communicate with any x NPP server with any XMPP account, regardless
of what server it's made on.
So it's similar to e mails.
When you create a Gmail account, you can use it to communicate with Hotmail, Yahoo or any other email.
This is exactly the same.
You can set up an account with any of these servers right here, and once you do, you can communicate
with all of the others, even if you're communicating with a server that is set up by a person, not
a public server.
Now you can see for each server right here we have a hidden service that you can use to access the server
from within the Tor network.
The inbound registration column here specifies whether you can sign up to this account without accessing
the website.
So if you can sign up using the XMPP protocol on its own, using your instant messenger such as pigeon.
In many cases, if.
Even if it says it's enabled here.
It doesn't really work.
So it's better to click on the link of the server that you want to sign up with and manually sign up
and I'll show you that in a minute.
The EP compliance gives an indication of the features and the specifications of X and P that this server
has implemented.
So if you click on this right here, you'll actually get this link right here and it will have a list
of the servers that we have and we can see the features in here on the top.
And each of these features are specifications will be green if the server is implementing it.
So you can see this server right here is implementing all of the specifications.
If we go down, you'll see some servers have red in here, which means that they haven't implemented
this specific specification.
Now you don't really need to go through all of this because again, in this list it's telling you excellent
for the ones that are implementing everything.
So you can just pick one of the ones that say excellent.
And finally, the IAM Observatory grade is a grade of the security of the server of how well they implemented
their TLS, which is their encryption and their DNS SEC.
Again, if you see a for this, that means it's pretty good.
So you can go for one of these servers.
Now, like I said, you can pick any of the servers in here before you do that, as usual.
I highly encourage you to read the privacy policy and see reviews about the server before you actually
go ahead and use it.
But for this lecture, I'm going to use this mail, which actually is a good server and I've seen good
reviews about it.
And as you can see, you get a normal website.
And what we want to do with this right now is just simply register.
So I'm going to click on register to register with them and it's asking us some very simple information
such as a username.
Again, make sure you set this to your fake identity.
So I'm going to set it to John Wick.
I'm going to set a password.
And answer the question and that's it.
We're done.
So as you can see, a very, very simple registration process, very similar to what you would do when
you're signing up for an email.
It didn't ask us for any personal information, and it took us a few seconds so you can actually even
create temporary accounts.
So every time you want to communicate with someone or every week or every two weeks, you can just create
a new account and use that to improve your security and anonymity.
So the username that I picked was John Wick, JH and w c k and it's the server that we have.
Is this so my account is going to be jh n w c k at this m.d.
So like I said, it's very similar to the way e mails work and even the format is very similar to the
format of emails.
So that's it.
The account is created and in the next lecture I'm going to show you how we're going to use this account
to log in to the server using an instant messenger that comes with tales, and we'll see how we can
use it to communicate with other accounts.