 Hi there, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal. So I wanted to take a look recently at a couple of privacy Conscious apps or the more secure end-to-end Encrypted messaging apps now, you know, I'm not not a sketchy person not selling drugs on the internet But now and again, I do have a do have uses or times where I'm like, it would be really useful if I could use an app whereby I Didn't work firstly didn't require PII that's less of a thing for me some people don't like the idea of handing over any personally identifiable information to a Technology company there are hardcore privacy people what interested me more about this app called session Was this notion that you could have two people talking on the internet who didn't know who the other party was You'd have two people talking on Twitter two people talking on reddit You know examples of social networks where there was anonymity could be easily achieved and those two people would have a means of contacting one another in a Manor that did not divulge their identity now if their identity is not divulged to the service provider to the company operating This app or to the other party, then they've got a pretty nice system going on for Anonymization now what what would you want to use this for? What do I occasionally think about this for? Well white hat use cases would be really stuff like whistleblowing if you're a Political dissident in an oppressive regime if you're a journalist who wants to contact sources in those kind of regimes And does you want to the sources either want to protect themselves or you want to protect your sources then? Something like this could be really really useful now Wherever there is white hat anonymity, there's going to be black hat anonymity So just as this has use cases for facilitating the white hat use cases of anonymity There is going to be shady people using this app too. I think that's going to be pretty much Guaranteed or expected at least now what interested me about session Was a couple of things so firstly Unlike and you know when people talk about these kind of more secure Messaging applications two names crop up crop up Disproportionately one of those is signal the other is telegram so people say, you know I don't like the fact that what's app is owned by Facebook And I don't like what I'm seeing in their terms of service What can he use it's more secure and people will say telegram or signal signal probably Higher up there than telegram and session is kind of higher up there again. It's like there are things. It's that Signal does that you may not like such as the fact that you do need if you install it conventionally from Android you go through the Play Store Etc. And this is really really seamless or from a PII standpoint Fingerprintless in terms of how this can be installed So you go on to get session and you've got your download options here including for desktop now What is just they've definitely built this in a deliberate manner thinking about thinking through all the things that Really privacy conscious folk might might need for instance for Android There's an APK download as well as the Play Store download So if you didn't want to if you wanted to run a Google less Android device and there are ways to do that Then you can install APK on to any operating system that supports APK including Android And that way you can install this without needing to go because once you're in the Play Store The Play Store is attached your email. The device is attached to the Play Store Etc. All fingerprints so gets session has really done a good job at figuring out ways to To circumnavigate that for people concerned about such matters cross-platform now This being a geeky kind of an app or the kind of thing that tech geeks would definitely be into Unsurprised to see there is Linux now this this session business it's up It is open source and from what I understand. It's a fork of signal. So you can go on to their github repository over here and they have separate repos for Session desktop session Android and session iOS. So you can go in and just take a look at the at the code base now I don't know enough about this. I don't know enough about signals code To really be able to comment too much about it. What I did read is that it's taken some of it's it's gone a little bit further than signals so in terms of Reducing the metadata being collected from the user But that's not really what interested me about session what interest me about session was again the fact that if we've two people on the internet Reddit accounts Twitter handles. Can we find a way that they're going to contact one another? Anonymously with that part party a known who's party B And if you think about that with stuff like WhatsApp, it already gets difficult to install WhatsApp You need a phone number you can get a virtual phone number Often there are difficult to Sign up for stuff using virtual phone numbers. So it's already getting messy telegram I believe there are ways but this look to be this to me look like why this is actually designed for this kind of thing so So anyway, that's the github and they have a website called oxen.io In which you can check out their development roadmap and some other cool things. Now without further ado, I'm going to go into I'm going to go in and download this for a bunch of you So in the download section just clicked on the Linux button and let's just take a look at what this looks like and How much I've had to tell session about who I am now Obviously the privacy the privacy conscious people would say well mistake one is you're not using a VPN so you could do all these things and I presume you could use it from behind the VPN Now there's a couple of interesting articles I came across on the internet regarding session Restore privacy comm has an explainer about this or kind of a review. It's from March 23rd. So relatively new send messages not made of data and it Makes a few points. This is from Heinrich Lang So he says session is a fork of signal Important and to end encryption, of course in a secure messaging app you'd expect and to end encryption And then he makes a couple of observations about how this works He said session can do this because it connects users through a tour like network of service nodes Service knows a server is a past messages back and forth through the network as well as provide additional services So that's definitely something that's important to know if you're thinking about using this that it's a node based system The onion request system that session uses to protect messages Ensures that no service node in the network ever knows both a messages origin IP and Destination this allows you to hide your IP by default. I guess if you say so Again, I'm not qualified to dig into the into the nuances of this But just this is what this is how it's supposed to work and He gives more details about it now I'm oxen.io is a company as I mentioned. This is significant Now what I thought would have been really really useful from my perspective when I was thinking about How could I use this kind of a thing or how could privacy advocates and Journalistic sources and whistleblowers use this video and Voice VoIP would have been really really useful. Unfortunately, they're not There at the moment as it says here now. I checked I checked out session like a month ago. So it doesn't look like anything's changed Session now handles basic messaging functions. It doesn't have some of the features that competitor is like signal or telegram Dude does not yet do voice or video calls If you need those capabilities, you need to look at a different master app now You're getting into complicating business here when you're looking for ways to anonymously set up phone calls or video meetings Workarounds you could set up a burner address create a zoom zoom using that and send out links using Using session one suggestion VoIP, I don't know But probably somebody watching this video if anyone does watch this video will know a session Will know an idea. So let me just go ahead and check out how this looks on Ubuntu Okay, so we have a 105 megabyte app image currently downloading onto my computer here and Let's just go and take a quick look at what is inside or how that looks like and I'm running here Ubuntu I think it's 2010 not LTS one of the like next releases up And let's take a look Okay, so I'm just going through the kind of usual Installation procedure when you get a program packaged as an app image on a month I've just put it into its own folder in my programs programs area and just to verify I need to just raise the permissions so that it can run and now let's take a look Okay, so now session has come to life and Suggest that we begin a session. So this is a home page here You've got a create session ID restore your account and link a device So this is quite useful that if you have session on your phone and your computer There is a way to do multi device just like you can on telegram And signal that is still preserves the anonymity of the overall system But the default way is just to click on create a session. So let's see what that does for us Okay, so I've just clicked on create your session ID and I have my Unique session ID coming up there, which is pretty cool. So Using this I can now go in I'm just blurring some of the some of the numbers and letters here And I can begin to share that out with other session users Okay, so I'm not really doing a very good job of trying to stay anonymous using this I've configured my screen name is Daniel R which is which is a bit of a giveaway But this is how it looks on the inside and now this is gonna be sort of just to keep this video short I have used this thing before with somebody, but it's a bit of a pain to Ask some one of your friends to download session to try out this this crazy privacy-focused app with me But it does work really well. So what I did do is just kind of copied over here my session ID And put that onto my computer and then I can send that out But I just want to show you guys what the actual app looks like on the inside So once you have contacts they'll appear they'll appear here You can change around a few sessions a few settings and you can join Open groups like oxen has a group or if you know a group URL you can go into it too So I'm just gonna see what happens if I go into the oxen group and see what's happening on the inside and Looks like Here we go. So you can see people are chatting and this is their session IDs That you can contact them and there's a lot of it's just loading up some of the older messages here So that is session. It's It's quite powerful in terms of how the chat interface looks. It's just like a regular chat interface basically, but You can preserve your sessions, but they are going to be Tight so you can do restore account and put in your session ID to get back in To one or just like keep it open on your computer But if you need a new session ID, then you can just generate that without providing PII and then save that into your password manager or ever you want to keep it and that will allow you to Mechanism for starting instant chats with other people Whoever those people might be Without them knowing who you are you know and who them are besides the screen name That's the only thing this only detail I gave and naturally if you want to be anonymous call yourself whatever you want So it's a pretty cool application messaging app the Negative would really be that it doesn't have Voice of video now. This is how you start a chat you put in somebody else's session ID So all I need is my session ID their session ID and we have a link So yeah, that is about it. It's an interest in interesting one. You could say for privacy conscious people Available cross-platform for Linux for Windows for Mac for iOS and for Android You can either get it through the Play Store or you can install it as an APK Thank you guys for watching more videos on tech stuff coming up soon