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Twister: The Fully Decentralized P2P Microblogging Platform
New submitter miguelfreitas writes "I'd like to offer for discussion with Slashdot readers this new proposal: twister is the fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform leveraging from the free software implementations of Bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols. This is not being pushed by any company or organization, it is the work of a single Brazilian researcher (me). The idea is to provide a scalable platform for censor-resistant public posting together with private messaging with end-to-end encryption. The basic concepts are described in FAQ while more in-depth technical details are available from the white paper. The twister network is running already: the client can be compiled for Linux, Mac, and Android. 2500 usernames were registered in the first 6 days."
2500 users is impressive. That's about half the size of all Linux desktop users, right?
How do you register a username in a fully decentralized environment?
Tech bubble anyone?
From the twister FAQ:
The architecture is designed so that other users can’t know if you are online or not, what your IP address is, or which users’ posts you might be reading.
also:
Q: How do you make money out of this? A: I don't.
I like your definition of "Tech bubble" - we can use it as a label to beat down or promote all sorts of extreme views on the internets.
Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
The more you tighten your grip, Clapper, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Secure, auditable, and distributed or downright personal servers should be the way of the future after we seen the abuses (from governments and companies) that enables to have everything centralized in few places. Of course, is pretty hard to get that for big numbers of people, as they are as group easily manipulable, but at least for the people that want security and privacy, must exist some options.
And yes, I know it's for distributing information without the iron heel of an oppressive government digging into you. And in all fairness, it could be used for that. In reality though, the people most likely to use this aren't actual freedom crusaders.
A genuine, bona-fide, copyright cartel internet shill. Bingo - Got one!
Yes people, let's not support this because we all know what sorts of unsavoury activities will be found there! It just kills me that someone might be doing something I don't like on the internet, and there will be no way to stop it!!!
There's no value in any of the other activities that might go on - none whatsoever.
My definition of Tech Bubble: Your business doesn't have to generate revenue in order to grab an investment for a few billion. All you need to do is combine some popular buzzwords ("MicroBlogging", "Scalable" and "BitCoin").
This guy can sell himself as the next generation of Twitter: "We use BitCoin technologies to enable Scalable Microblogging" :)
So how does this improve on the dominant "darknet" technologies? What about all the lesser (failed?) p2p darknets like Antz, Mute or GnuNet? /.
TD;DR of course. This is
The blockchain will soon grow disproportionally large. Right now it's probably managable, but you know what? I'm not downloading tens of gigabytes of blockchain just for the plessure of reading lols on decentralized blogs.
Nice idea though...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How do you register a username in a fully decentralized environment?
In like manner of BitCoin registering a transaction in a fully decentralized way.
1) You make the claim to a username with a set of encryption keys.
2) The daemons accept the transaction and insert it into the block chain.
From then on, the only person who can claim to be that username must present credentials based on the encryption keys. Keep those safe, and no one cal masquerade as you on the system.
Not only that, it says "can be compiled for Linux, Mac, and Android". What about Windows? I'm all for using free software, but putting out a product like this and then ignoring the most popular operating system in the world by a long shot seems to be like they're asking for it to fail. It's like like they're only targeting free operating systems, as Mac somehow made the list.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Give him bitcoins instead :D /. article this year so far.
This is definitely my favorite
Mmm... social networking and telecommunications on a decentralised network with no way of inserting advertising, profiling users, and no easy way of monitoring their communications (Yeah, that was meant for you, NSA, GCHQ, et al). Let's hope it'll work over Tor. And may it be the first of many...
Hopefully, it'll use interoperable messaging and encryption protocols so that other projects can join the same network easily... and an easy way to generate and exchange public keys. If encryption is controlled by the user, then 3rd parties or service providers (That one's for you Facebook) can't change your privacy settings; you have control. Clients for all operating systems would be cool too.
Does this have support from EFF? Anyone else?
Yes, but your counter-troll failed harder. A company I was working for got bought out by IBM, and I was really excited about it, because from the outside they looked like they were making a huge push towards using linux as their primary OS, and open source software in general. (I ended up working for them for about 5 years.)They managed to get Notes, their primary communication tool, working almost as well on Linux as it worked on Windows... which is not particularly well... but they haven't even ported over many of their basic tools, such as their ticket tracking systems, which are used to track development as well, to Linux. As of a few years ago, they said that they were going to stop attempting to port those tools over. For server operating systems, in many applications, they're still relentlessly pushing their developers to concentrate on coding for AIX over linux.
They've got a bright shiny image put forth from their marketing department as one big unified force pushing for workplace innovation, but the way the company actually works is much more like the government Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil.' Their linux workstation project was an underfunded, disorganized yet highly publicized project put together during their big linux marketing push. I don't even think 25% of the company directly touches linux on a daily basis, let alone the absolutely laughable assertion that 90% of the company uses linux as a primary desktop OS.
APK is already available from download page.
Not only that, it says "can be compiled for Linux, Mac, and Android". What about Windows? I'm all for using free software, but putting out a product like this and then ignoring the most popular operating system in the world by a long shot seems to be like they're asking for it to fail. It's like like they're only targeting free operating systems, as Mac somehow made the list.
You have a good point, but I think it is important to understand that Windows is probably only the third most popular OS after Android and iOS at this point if we count installations where the end user has the right and ability to install new software.
Linux, Mac and Android are all UNIX-based. Writing something for Linux is relatively easily portable to Mac or Android. Porting to Windows is another venture alltogether.
No, the APK includes the server (compiled for Android and running as a local service)
then how do you stop some bot taking many usernames every second? (doesn't say in the FAQ, and it could be a real problem if multiple bots try to generate many usernames each)
That's an interesting and insightful point.
I'm going to forward it to Miguel and the people over at the Twister forum (unless you'd like to do it - I'll hold off for a couple of hours in case you do).
This is exactly what they need. A nascent project looking for feedback from smart, informed, and motivated users.
Windows is a notable but minor OS among software developers in the crypto-anarchy scene. Provided the project picks up steam a Windows build will come along soon enough. There are more important things to do right now.
Not only that, it says "can be compiled for Linux, Mac, and Android". What about Windows?
The front-end is HTML5/Javascript. The daemon is written in C++, using a few open source libraries. It would only require a good C++ developer to port it to Windows.
And the entire protocol is opensource, the core technologies are opensource, so anyone with a good knowledge in C++ and any other language can port it to anything...
Nothing is ever "fully decentralized" until the internet itself is a giant mesh network.
Better compare it with Diaspora or Movim, that are more in the same league, descentralized social networks. at least for the upper layer. If you want to go to the transport protocol, is afaik the bitcoin network protocol, so no darknets or i.e. Tor implied there. And as based on bitcoin, should imply no anonimity neither (what is a good thing in a social network)
Last time I checked, /. comments could be rated
by randomly selected [registered] readers,
I hope you've got a similar scheme i Twister...?
There is no username and password, it's a public key and a private key but yes if you lose your private key someone can post under your identity. Just like if you lose your PGP private key, someone can send an email and pretend to be you.
Usenet is a full discussion platform where people could express their thoughts at any length and have ongoing conversations lasting days, weeks or longer -- it's not limited to soundbites as microblogging or most social networking is. "Twister" is far more like the decentralized social-networking platform Diaspora with character limits.
The tech community concerned about government censorship/spying should be putting its efforts into repopulating Usenet, rather than engaging in endless attempts to reinvent the wheel that all stall out in the octagonal stage due to lack of participation or burnout. It has no central owner, servers all over the planet (so if one engages in censorship or is shut down, users can easily switch), proxies (for anonymous access/posting) and existing client software.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)