In an attempt to make my private life more private (especially while at work), I set out to find a good way to encrypt my IM traffic.

My options:

OTR - Off the record (encryption built into IM clients)

Pros: OTR is encryption for IM conversations :D

Cons: Not everyone has OTR, OTR implementations are different between clients, You can still sniff who the traffic was going to / coming from.

naim - shell / ncurses based IM client

Pros: I can SSH to a box, and use this client.

Cons: .. it's a console IM client.  IM is all about the windows.  I don't want my IM conversations to feel like IRC.  I'm just not ready for it.  I had a hard time connecting when I tried to use it.

meebo + ssh + safari
best solution ever

Here's how you get this done... 

1. go to www.meebo.com to see which one of their nodes you are going to connect to.  You're redirected to it and you can just copy it out of the address bar once you visit the site. (I usually connect to wwwl.meebo.com)
2. create an SSH tunnel from your client through your shell box to your meebo node.  A command like this does it for me (remove the quotes) "ssh -L localhost:8081/wwwl.meebo.com:80 me@my.shellhost.com" where me@my.shellhost.com is your login and your shell's hostname.
3. go to http://localhost:8081 in your browser.
4. log in to your IM account or meebo.com account
5. talk shit with reckless abandon

Ok that's it for my ghetto tutorial.  OH if you're really paranoid (this is where safari comes in) enable private browsing.  Now it doesn't leave any cache or history data.. nobody knows you were even doing it!

--_- 

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