BitTorrent today released a 'pre-alpha' of its anonymous chat service Bleep. The service was announced last year and claims to allows users to chat without a central server with the benefit that conversations and metadata also aren't stored on a central server.
The version of Bleep released today is only available for Windows 7 and Windows 8. To download and use it you need to be the lucky one with an invite. The developers promise that versions for other operating systems will be released later. Whether that also means it will become available for mobile phones is unclear.
Bleep users can sign-in using an e-mail address, a phone number or anonymous. Anonymous users can be added by friends by scanning a QR code or entering an unique key.
The pre-alpha has some limitations, messages can only be sent when both users are online, an offline messages feature should be added later. Accounts are also not synchronized, which means when you login with your account on a different machine with your account, your history is lost. Also calls with the VOIP feature of Bleep appear not to be working yet. Adding contacts and having conversations does work flawlessly so far.
Bleep doesn't use central servers but instead, according to the developers, each Bleep client is also also a Bleep server. The service works similar to BitTorrent's cloud storage service BitTorrent Sync which also doesn't use any central servers.
Conversations in Bleep are encrypted with so called end-to-end encryption, which means the clients deal with encrypting and decrypting messages again without the need of a central server. The same feature can be found in other messaging services like Treema, TextSecure and Telegram.
Unfortunately Bleep is not open source, so how secure the software is in practice, can't be verified by having a close look at the source of the software.
