Tor Messenger will keep your conversations private

Tor has released a beta version of its cross-platform chat program, which will help you keep your conversations away from prying eyes.

Tor Messenger works with a variety of chat services/protocols, including Jabber, IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter and Yahoo. Tor uses Off-the-Record (OTR) protocol to encrypt your IMs.

With this, your IMs pass through Tor's network of volunteer computers for security and anonymity. Chat logging is disabled by default, according to Wired.

The company's public policy director told Wired, "With Tor Messenger, your chat is encrypted and anonymous... so it is hidden from snoops, whether they are the government of a foreign country or a company trying to sell you boots."

Tor Messenger imports contacts from the services you use, so you won't have to manually add all your contacts.

However, if you're the only one concerned enough about your privacy to use an OTR-enabled client, your messages won't go through to your friends. You can disable this setting, but Tor doesn't recommend that. Obviously it defeats the purpose of using such a client in the first place.