Slashdot Mirror
Encrypted Social Network Vies For Disgruntled Facebook Users
angry tapir writes "With the look of Google Plus and Facebook-like elements, a new social network named "Syme" feels as cozy as a well-worn shoe. But beneath the familiar veneer, it's quite different. Syme encrypts all content, such as status updates, photos and files, so that only people invited to a group can view it. Syme, which hosts the content on its Canada-based servers, says it can't read it. "The overarching goal of Syme is to make encryption accessible and easy to use for people who aren't geeks or aren't hackers or who aren't cryptography experts," co-founder Jonathan Hershon said in an interview about the service." See also Diaspora.
They encrypt all of your data and keep it secret. Until the day that they don't.
That's not the fatal flaw. If you generated a private key and people you friended got a copy of a public key... it could feasibly make it so they couldn't read it. That's fine.
The real problem with that site is that all of 4 people actually care about encrypted, so their market size is negligible. And those 4 people are basement dwellers anyways, so the advertisers don't care either. Expect them to struggle to monetize it and stay in business.
So it's a social network that "protects your data" ... and requires Google Chrome. :/
Why am I skeptical?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
So, who wants odds on how long it'll take before this becomes a haven for pæderasts to swap kiddie porn? Anyone?
I'm guessing about six months..
Fuck the children... not in that way though. This is why we can't have anything nice, there's always someone trying to save the kids.
A truly free social network would have no ads, no profit motive, no logs, no intrusion; just a way for people to share as much or as little with only those they wish to share with.
Is there really no true libre social network, and if not, why not?
Money.
Facebook and Google don't do the things they do simply because they are evil. They do it because that;s how they get the money to pay for those giant buildings full of servers that they run, which provide the services you use.
Maybe in the 24th century when The Federation is building starships, colonizing the galaxy and zooming around the universe, all without any apparent need for money, they can also build your "no ads, no profit motive" social network.
If you aren't being charged for the product, you are the product.
This axiom has been true for a very long time and it's true for this site as well as any other such thing. How are they making money? I'm not objecting to their making money, after all they have to pay for their servers, bandwidth and admins and so on.
It's a fundamental question that you simply can't ignore and economics requires that you have to deal with it whether you want to or not. You can have sponsors that donate time and materials, you have generic ads, volunteers to a certain point, you can charge people for your service and so on.
The point is somehow or another you have to get money, and this site is claiming that they get money in ways that don't exploit your privacy. Since exploiting your privacy is how these sites normally pay your bills, this leaves serious questions on how they are monetizing their site.
I love the idea that a site can raise money without exploiting privacy in an evil manner, but before I can give them any credibility to their model I have to know their model works. I hate to rain on people's feel good parade, but you can' run a website on community goodwill, hugs and unicorn farts.
well, if they're looking to woo disgruntled users, then slashdot is a great place to advertise!
Yeah, I understand Economics 101. I also understand that Firefox, Linux, Wikipedia, Apache, PHP, etc. are not all about the money (thought money is tied to most of them extraneously; but not really at all to Wikipedia).
There are these things called non-profits. A non-profit social network seems like a no-brainer, and I'm not sure why it doesn't exist; let alone rule them all.
A non-profit social network could show ads... to people who felt like seeing them. Money gets made (enough to buy servers & connectivity), but the profit itself isn't the core motive. And the users are not product.
How about a "different Facebook" where they didn't censor the things you write and post, but instead, your content is judged, and viewed (or not viewed) based on the opinions of those you've invited to share your pages? How about a "different Facebook" where anyone can join? How about a "different Facebook" where you can cleanly choose ads, or paid presence? How about a "different Facebook" where you control how your personal information is accessed, instead of having control assumed by the social network?
Your focus on "libre" is incomprehensible to me. Of all the myriad things wrong with Facebook -- and by that I mean things directly harmful to its users and potential users, and unchangeable by them -- "libre" is far down any list ranked by importance.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
you have no right to violate my privacy as i tell the world about everything in my entire life!
The discussion here is about sharing within a controlled group.
Read the link you provide - startCollectors is not required when the browser supports the proper crypto RNG, Chrome does, and they only support Chrome. So there is no bug.
A bigger problem is the possibility of back doors. Their privacy policy merely asserts that they would rather shut the service down than add a back door, but when the men in black come knocking they won't be given any choice in the matter so this assertion is worthless. What's more Chrome apps silently auto update. I won't be too harsh on them for this though because fixing it would require them to split the RSA key used for signing updates, find people in other jurisdictions who can review their code (assuming it's open source - their website didn't seem to say), and generally making the whole process deterministic. BTW if the authors are reading this comment, I have an open source RSA threshold signature library (but which isn't publicly available, it's the result of some academic research project). Feel free to email me and I will send it onwards. It might make it possible to ensure app updates have to be signed by a large group of people before they take effect.
It wouldn't be very private if anyone who signed in could see who else is using it, would it? If anything, the inability to do that is a sign of a sound design.