Cult of Dead Cow Hacktivists Design Encryption System for Mobile Apps

Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won't keep hold of users' personal data. From a report: The group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has developed a coding framework that can be used by app developers who are willing to embrace strong encryption and forsake revenue from advertising that is targeted to individuals based on detailed profiles gleaned from the data most apps now routinely collect. The team is building on the work of such free products as Signal, which offers strong encryption for text messages and voice calls, and Tor, which offers anonymous web surfing by routing traffic through a series of servers to disguise the location of the person conducting the search.

The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments. Called Veilid, and pronounced vay-lid, the code can be used by developers to build applications for mobile devices or the web. Those apps will pass fully encrypted content to one another using the Veilid protocol, its developers say. As with the file-sharing software BitTorrent, which distributes different pieces of the same content simultaneously, the network will get faster as more devices join and share the load, the developers say. In such decentralized "peer-to-peer" networks, users download data from each other instead of from a central machine.

How soon until

[schwit1]

Using encryption, VPNs and Tor are an admission of guilt?

Re:

[nucrash]

I believe that was as early of 90s.

I didn't realize cDc was still around.

Re:How soon until

[dead_user]

Too many workplaces use VPN for remote networking to just ban it without major repercussions. It's a de-facto part of the internet now.

Re:

[Opportunist]

The Cute Cat theory [wikipedia.org] needs to be expanded to include "what corporations want".

Actually, "what corporations want" will in the long run probably trump cute cats.

USG backdoors

[HBI]

Does any of this give you an actual warm and fuzzy? USNRL released Tor back in the mid-2000s. VPN technologies generally use ciphers that the USG specified like AES.

I'd be more comfortable with something created by someone else.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Does any of this give you an actual warm and fuzzy? USNRL released Tor back in the mid-2000s. VPN technologies generally use ciphers that the USG specified like AES.

I'd be more comfortable with something created by someone else.

Well, China has a bunch of encryption algorithms you can use as well. Many of them are only authorized for use within China (export restricted) so there may be something there.

You run into it if you have to deal with China - they want you to use their encryption algorithms and all th

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Not until someone obtains an abortion through encrypted communications.

veilid.com

[bill_mcgonigle]

The website:

https://veilid.com/ [veilid.com]

cDc?

[bhcompy]

Cult of the Dead Cow? Did I wake up from a coma? Am I back on Usenet and IRC again?

Re:

[Gibgezr]

"Go back to sleep, Grampy, you've been reading too much 2600 again."

Re:

[bhcompy]

What's that, Sonny? I can't hear you. I went deaf from sticking a red box to my ears

Re:

[Orgasmatron]

I've been watching you, Clarence, and tonight you committed a horrible sin. Tonight you... this is hard for me to say, I'm getting choked up... RECKLESSLY DELETED T-FILES WITH A WILDCARD CHARACTER! Clarence, how could you? How could you have so little regard for the sanctity of text files?

Re:

[CAIMLAS]

Right? I thought they'd long since disappeared. Kinda cool to hear they're around.

I vaguely recall seeing warez sites with their nfo files...

Re:

[Moridineas]

Interesting! I just looked them up on Wikipedia. I didn't realize their history goes back to the 80s.

In highschool in the 90s I helped my physics teacher manage two physics labs worth of computers. We were high tech at the time, and in addition to teaching AP Computer Science and AP Physics, the teacher also ran the school's IT. The server was a Netware server in a closet off the physics classrom with a screensaver of an ASCII worm that bounced around and got longer as the load got higher. He also let me br

Re:

[Ztras]

Cypherpunks will rise again!

Re:

[Fuck_this_place]

Hay, come join my Hotline server and d/l some of these crakz brew. They clean dun worry.

Next, they'll need a Meta trained AI

[John.Banister]

Being able to stay anonymous is important, but if Musk has shown us nothing else, he's shown us what a collection of unrestrained speech can look like. No one sentient should have to see the extent of that, but employees of Meta already have. We need an AI trained on the data that created their suffering to moderate out the worst humanity has to offer if we're having social media where perfect anonymity can result in perfect lack of restraint. The insta-filtering would also make the service useless for sh

Reboots

[Njovich]

Did they run out of crappy 80s and 90s movies to reboot and now are starting with hacking groups? At least in programming we are covered with Go doing an Algol reboot.

How about Beto?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Is he involved in this? Will Ted Cruz try to use it against him?

Sounds like...

[VeryFluffyBunny]

...Richard Hendricks is finally getting the decentralised internet he always wanted. Yay, for middle-out compression!