X – formally known as Twitter – has been expanded upon since it was taken over by Elon Musk in 2022, moving away from its simple image of being a microblogging and social networking service. Today, it’s testing all kinds of features, from paid subscriptions that give you perks like making longer posts and reduced ads, and an integrated AI service called Grok.
The latest of these features is XChat, transforming X into a Facebook messenger type of service but with added levels of security. The service includes:
- Encryption
- Vanishing messaging
- The ability to send file attachments
- Audio and Video calls
It utilises the program Rust, which is known for its high level of security. Other major messaging services like WhatsApp use this. However, Musk tried to edge itself over the competition by saying that it’s built on Rust, but with “Bitcoin-style encryption”. Unfortunately, it’s unclear what Musk means by this due to Bitcoin not actually being encrypted, it uses public key cryptography.
If you’re unsure what this terminology means, basically, “encryption” means ‘a cybersecurity measure that scrambles plain text into a secret code to prevent unauthorized access’. Whilst ‘cryptography’ is a practice and study of techniques for secure communication. Hopefully this disparity in his claims will be answered or elaborated on in the future as this could mean XChat will be less secure than it lets on.
Currently, XChat is in its Beta form which means things can still change, yesterday it was announced that XChat would inform the user if the person they were having a conversation with had screenshotted their messages. You can even disable their ability to do so within your conversations.
Users that had a paid subscription to X were invited to try the Early access version at the end of May, but now it seems functional to all users. When testing the feature, you can only message another user if they have set up XChat on their X account, you can send an invite to instigate this.
This is all just Musk’s next step in making X into an all encompassing platform, tackling other competition like WhatsApp and IMessage by focusing on messaging. However, it’s in its early days, so we could see a lot more revisions and hopefully an official X blog post that details everything for wary first-time users.
