Show HN: Free, instant, secure, disposable chat rooms built in Go

I only feel safe using end-to-end encrypted chatrooms. Currently, niltalk can read every message. At the very least, AES encrypting messages by the chatroom&#x27;s password will reduce reliance on SSL. But it really should use public key crypto for a key exchange between users. This is what&#x27;s done by other disposable chatrooms:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crypto.cat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crypto.cat&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ephemeral.pw&#x2F;chat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ephemeral.pw&#x2F;chat&#x2F;</a> (Also written in Go)

Have two buttons: &quot;vote to keep open&quot; and &quot;vote to close&quot;. Colour them orange and blue. Release it to Reddit. Potential viral hit.

You can checkout the public repo here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;goniltalk&#x2F;niltalk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;goniltalk&#x2F;niltalk</a>

Good work. Though I have to say I&#x27;ve seen so many of these web-based &quot;secure, private, anonymous&quot; chat services now, I&#x27;ve lost track.<p>What we need is end-to-end encryption and with an open source client that just has to be downloaded and built&#x2F;installed once (and in such a way that it&#x27;s verifiably secure, think reproducible builds).

Have you been measuring the server load of this at all since this thread has been open? Very curious as to what that looks like.

Is this open-source?<p>If it is could you post a link to a public repo. Thanks :)

I&#x27;ve been killed kicking around the idea of doing something similar, in go, with the domain I own ChatFor.Us<p>JavaScript encryption, as others have mentioned is the thing I see I was planning that&#x27;s missing from yours.<p>I&#x27;m planning on going a different direction with the domain, this functionality for private messaging for a platform set up for chat rooms as well.<p>Right now though I&#x27;m investigating a node.js and rethinkdb infrastructure, but that&#x27;s also because I will need to persist data somehow.<p>Thanks for building this, at least validates that someone else has similar ideas.

And this is secured how exactly?

How one runs this? I installed go, and redis. The ran &quot;go get github.com&#x2F;goniltalk&#x2F;niltalk&quot;, which installed. The previous command created three directories under my $GOPATH, one on which has a &#x27;nilktalk&#x27; executable.<p>For someone who has never dabbled with go, how do I run nilktalk after all of the above was done?

Nice idea, sadly only as secure as https.

This is an awesome service. Thanks for making it available to everyone. Can I ask what the use case is for this? I talk to my friends using FB messenger or Google chat and my customers using a chat widget on our site, so I&#x27;m curious when I would use this.

To make it even more instant (in terms of UX), I would display the message immediately so you don&#x27;t get the little delay. From where I&#x27;m at, it&#x27;s about 250 milliseconds from the point I hit ENTER to when I see the text displayed.

I have opened a room. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niltalk.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;8CKyw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niltalk.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;8CKyw</a> I am not going to tell the password though. Let&#x27;s see how long it lasts!

first off... this is great! I wonder if you could make it so when you create a room, you can attach a message.<p>So for instance i could generate a password then sign it with my partners public key then paste that in the message box so theoretically only they could get access to the channel.<p>and and, create rooms that are meant for someone, so their public key is the index and their private key decrypts the message to get the password into the channel.

hn chat time!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niltalk.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bfT9W" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niltalk.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;bfT9W</a>, hn-923732

Really interesting to read through the source code and get an idea of how you&#x27;re using Go to write APIs, thanks for sharing!

This site uses insecure 1024 bit Diffie-Hellman parameters for Diffie-Hellman key exchange! Please fix!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niltalk.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;h8XLk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;niltalk.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;h8XLk</a> pw hnchat<p>don&#x27;t delete the room! lol<p>edit: this doesn&#x27;t work on a public forum. some asshole always deletes it.

I&#x27;m curious to see if this takes off, how long before the powers-that-be start to say something.