Tox Is Your New Secure Chat Application

In aprevious article, I talked about the Ring communication app. The article proved quite popular and aside from drawing a bit of attention -- or maybe because of it -- that article also drew some criticism, including "What about Tox ?" That’s a totally fair question, so here we are.

About Tox

I have talked about about TOX elsewhere , albeit very briefly. And, when I saw the turn Skype was taking, I re-wrote parts of the ever-evolving Multimedia section in Ubuntu User magazine and included Tox as a recommended IM/video conferencing solution, with the caveat that it was still rough around the edges. Some time has passed since then, and now it’s time to check out TOX and see how the project is coming along.

Tox is open source, encrypts messages, uses a P2P network to relay messages, and has clients for a wide of platforms, including mobile devices. So far, so cool. What Tox isn't is one, defined, closed application. It is actually a bunch of projects that revolve around the central toxcore project. In consequence, there are several clients and other bits and pieces you can use to communicate over Tox. Because most of us are end users, I’ll look at the project from that point of view and show how to get some clients up and running.

Installing

Several clients are available out there, including one for the shell. The most popular ones for desktop use are qTox and uTox .

It seems that no official PPA for qTox is currently supported for Ubuntu, and the instructions on the Tox site are outdated and do not work. Don’t despair though. Although the site recommends compiling from source if you can't install from a repository, there will be no need for that today. The qTox's GitHub site says there are packaged versions of the client for many of the most popular distros compiled by a kind openSUSE user.

To install qTox on Ubuntu, for example, you can do the following:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/antonbatenev:/tox/xUbuntu_16.04/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qtox.list" wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:antonbatenev:tox/xUbuntu_16.04/Release.key sudo apt-key add - < Release.key sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install qtox

Installing on openSUSE was surprisingly simpler: Just click on your version of openSUSE in the link above, and Yast does the rest.

The uTox client is even easier to install. The project developers supply a package that is statically compiled -- no need to even modify repositories, install dependencies, and so on. Just download, and decompress with

tar xvf utox_linux_x86-64.tar.xz

An executable file called (unsurprisingly) utox will appear in your folder. Run that and you're in business.

Antox is the most popular Tox client for Android and you can install it from Google Play .

Profiles

uTox has the added advantage of being more lightweight than qTox, but at the cost of features. One such feature that makes me favor qTox over uTox for the desktop is its easy profile import/export feature. qTox allows you to import profile files from over clients (like uTox), so you can go from uTox to qTox and not lose your contacts or details. But you can't do this the other way around, because uTox has no easy way to import profiles.

tox-fig01.png

Figure 1: Setting up a profile in qTox entails picking a username and setting a password.

Used with permission

qTox's profile import/export feature comes in handy also when you want to port your profile to another device, such asyour smartphone. To do this, set up your profile on qTox by clicking on the profile picture and then scroll down to the bottom.

You will see a series of buttons that allow you to manage your profile and password (Figure 1).

The one you need is, of course, Export . Click that and then choose a place in whichto store the Tox profile file.

tox-antox-fig05.png

Figure 2: You can share profiles across devices by exporting and importing profile files.

Used with permission

Next, send the file to your phone, open Antox for the first time, and you'll see a button that allows you to import a profile file (Figure 2).

Locate the file you copied over from your desktop machine to your phone and open it. If you are using a password on your desktop client, Antox will tell you that the file is encrypted and ask you to enter a password. Use the password you use to open your desktop client.

Calling

Before you call a friend, you'll need to mutually authorize each other (Figure 3). In qTox, you do this by clicking on your profile image in the panel on the left and, as with Ring.cx, your Tox client will provide you with a long hexadecimal string to pass around to your colleagues.

qTox also generates a QR barcode you can snap with your phone instead of having to copy out the long list of numbers and letters (Figure 4).

tox-fig04.png

Figure 3: You need to authorize contacts before you can talk to them.

Used with permission

You can also sign up to an ID server like toxme.io so that other users can find you easily. To sign up to this service, again click on your profile picture and scroll down until you see the Toxme register section.

tox-fig02.png

Figure 4: Share your Tox ID or a QR barcode with others so they can friend you.

Used with permission

Once you have your friend's ID, you can send of a friend request. Friend requests may take up to several minu