Facebook chat for Mac OS X
by Volker Weber
Today Facebook released a chat app for Windows 7. People are speculating about a Mac OS X port. Why wait? iChat is the perfect chat app for both Google Talk and Facebook. Both use the Jabber protocol. For Google there is a built-in setup. And for Facebook it's quite easy. Go to iChat preferences and a add a new account. Here are the required parameters:
Comments
Of course you don't want to use that on an unencrypted wifi connection or on a wired network where you don't trust operators. (At least I could not find any reference about them implementing any kind of encryption like in-band TLS)
Am I too security- conscious when I wonder if they do support SSL? I am not very happy with the (insecure) handling of login data for a lot of other IM services already.
Not that SSL is secure either, depending on the variants, but better than plain text I keep thinking.
I remember the heise/ c't test for how secure some apps really are, to start with, and I guess I do not want to know at times.
I did not refresh this page before actually posting, but two ppl think alike here...
Adium seems to be able to work with a "Facebook authorization" that doesn't send your FB-credentials over the network, but I'm not sure how much more secure that is, but it might be an alternative.
Enabling "Request SSL/TSL" in Adium works with chat.facebook.com. It also shows me the host's DigiCert certificate.
Enabling "Old SSL" does not work so I don't know what iChat would do.
