`Lo sralston, AKA Steve. Good to see you here on Advogato. One cert down, . . .

Got distracted from xmms yesterday when I noticed the "Invisible IRC Project" listed on the CodeCon website. v1 is pretty much "encrypted, hopefully anonymized, IRC." v2 (in development), is what I'm interested in. Sounds like some ideas I tossed around (bad follow through) for a distributed, encrypted, chat system. One thing that I ran into was how to avoid dupe sends of the same message between systems that are acting as servers. Obviously, don't send it to the system you got it from, but I was also thinking about using a 32bit CRC or md5sum for the message along with a TTL. The sum could be used both for error detection and by transmitting the sum ahead of the message, the receiving server can say "already got that." Next question is: for the average size of chat/irc messages, is the computation+transmission overhead of an additional checksum worth it?