Now that the NSA has everyone second-guessing themselves before hitting the Send button, BitTorrent is jumping into the chat game. The service credited with enabling
record-breaking piracy of HBO’s Game of Thrones announced Bleep alpha, a chat service for Windows. The chat’s draw is that it’s meant to keep your chat safe from prying eyes by offering end-to-end encryption and BitTorrent’s distributed data transfer technology, instead of servers. Even BitTorrent can’t see what you’re saying, the company says.
BitTorrent is meant to be a private chat tool that keeps your data a mystery to everyone - even BitTorrent.
In fact, that’s where the service gets its name. “Well, basically, we never see your messages or metadata. As far as we’re concerned, anything you say is “bleep” to us,” a
BitTorrent spokesperson wrote on the company blog. If the service is indeed snoop-proof, it would be handy for everything from innocuous chats with friends to sensitive conversations between journalists and sources – or people with bad intentions. Like just about any privacy-focused service, Bleep has the potential to be a double-edged sword.
Right now, Bleep is in “Pre-Alpha” and is only available on Windows 7/8, but BitTorrent expects to expand to other platforms as the service matures. You can
request an invite if you want to give it a whirl.
Joshua Gulick
Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to
Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote
CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for
Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for
HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.