For online chatting and communication you have to be very careful as to how you choose your way of conducting these chats. If you will be talking about sensitive subjects it is best to make sure the chats you are in are encrypted or you are at least protected from someone knowing where you are at. Many people have been logged along with their IPs for not taking step to being safe. Here is a list that can help you.
Internet Relay Chats:
IRC clients are recommended, Web IRC’s log IPs and have the potential of being hacked and passwords being released. There are many clients that you can use such as Icechat or mIRC which are some of the best ones. Firefox also has a plugin that will allow you to chat in IRC networks within the browser called Chatzilla.
Another great service is called Pidgin which can be used for emails, IRC, MSN, AIM and even more at once, even Facebook chats. The program also encrypts everything, something I would suggest looking in to.
Instant Messaging:
For instant messaging such as Google Talk, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ and etc. You can check out Off The Record (OTR) messaging here, which could help you lots. It is important you can set a proxy for the app for Tor by using;
socks5 - host: localhost port:9050
For highly encrypted conversations you can check out CSpace, which has 2048 bit encrypted, Peer to Peer chat with SSL and PGP security. This program is highly recommended since it also allows Filesharing and Desktop Sharing. Check it out.
Online Encrypted Chats:
Sometimes people would prefer to not download anything to prevent anything from being saved on their computers, well if you are one of these people here are some nice websites where you can have encrypted chats without the download. Chatcrypt is a nice simple encrypted chat where you have to let the person know the room and password and if they do not enter it exactly the same they would not be able to see the chat. It is very basic which some people prefer, It has AES-256 CTR encryption on chat messages which only participating chatters can view. Another more popular option is CryptoCat, where Messages are encrypted inside your own browser using AES-256. Encrypted data is securely wiped after one hour of inactivity. Also CryptoCat can be used easily on mobile devices, so you pick but both are very safe。
