Shoutbox

I'm sorry if this has been mentioned or suggested before.

I would like to suggest the addition of contact authentication and conversation/file transfer encryption to Msgplus. In this day in age of identity theft, phishing, information theft, etc, no doubt security is a major concern on everyones minds and as such I think such features would be very useful. Msgplus already has log encryption and password protection, why not take Msgplus's security one step further
I know there are already several free addons available for messenger that offer such a feature but problem is that the contact you intend to have an secure conversation/file transfer with must also have the addon installed. MsgPlus's large user base would greatly reduce this problem. I'm not sure how easy this would be to implement.

Why the need for authentication and encryption?
It is almost scary how easy it is for someone to listen in on your messenger conversations and/or make themselves a copy of your file transfers. The government, Microsoft, your ISP, your network admin at work/school or even just someone on your network can easily use something like Iris (See this TechTV article for more info) to do so.
This feature would be useful for those living in oppressive countries like China and Iran (no more having to spend your life in prison for being a dissident because you told your friend in the US your locally elected official likes to wear womens underwear), whistleblowers (now you can tell the board of health that the McDonalds you work for uses 1/3 rat meat in its quarter pounder with cheese), generally at work (no more getting busted by your boss because the network admin found out and told him you were considering a position with the competition), generally at home/school (no more your dad messaging you his credit card # so you can put some text books on it and then finding it maxed with porn cause someone was sniffing your convo) etc. No doubt, however, if you part of a sleeper cell wanting to confirm your orders with your commander in Morocco, the NSA/CIA could probably still find out, but with RSA key authentication up to 4096 bits and conversation encryption up to 256 bits using either AES or Twofish it would still make it very hard Consider that standard SSL used when you use PayPal, Internet banking or buy something using your credit card from Amazon is only 128bit "high grade" encryption.

See Secway SimpLite for MSN for more info of the kind of feature I'm suggesting.