'The PRISM revelations have made people more concerned about privacy and security. So now is the time to give people an alternative’
— Michael Powers
Michael Powers wants to do what so many others have failed to do: build an online social network that’s outside the grip of any one company — and that people like you will actually use.
We’ve seen countless underground hackers build decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter over the years, but so far these open source contraptions have failed to attract anything close to the number of people who use Facebook and Twitter and other commercial services almost constantly. But Powers, a serial entrepreneur based in Washington, D.C., thinks he can finally crack the code.
His project is called Trsst, a name that’s meant to engender a sense of trust, and after a summer when NSA leaker Edward Snowden opened the curtain on modern government surveillance, the Trsst message is particularly timely. “The PRISM revelations have made people more concerned about privacy and security,” Powers says. “So now is the time to give people an alternative.”
Although Powers hopes to make the system as easy to use as Twitter, it includes some pretty geeky tools under the hood, including many that provide added security. For example, all “direct messages” sent through Trsst will be encrypted, and all messages can be “signed” so that you’ll know the messages are authentic and haven’t been tampered with.
In this way, Trsst is less like Diaspora and more like Mailpile — an open source email client with an emphasis on security that recently raised $100,000. “We want the average user to encrypt more,” Powers says. “If everyone encrypted everything then the bad guys wouldn’t know where to look.”
It’s important to note, however, that nothing offers perfect privacy. Rainey Reitman, the director of the activism team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that common email encryption systems may keep the contents of messages protected, but they might expose other information, such as when and to whom messages were sent. Other tools, such as the OffTheRecord chat system or The New Yorker’sDeadDrop file-sharing system, may be better for some tasks.
Others worry about trying to bolt encryption systems onto existing systems like RSS. “I’m happy it’s focused on decentralized and federated communication, because that is essential for spreading out risk,” says Brett Slatkin, an engineer at Google and co-developer of the open source cloud storage system Camlistore. “I’m worried they’re trying to build too much all at once. Security is extremely hard to get right and you need to vet a design like this.”
But Powers is at least starting in the right place. Trsst is more of a protocol than a piece of software. It’s an extension to existing standards, a system for sending messages between autonomous servers. “It’s not rocket science. It’s basic 10-year-old technology, but it’s about how you combine them,” he says.
That may leave you wondering why he needs $48,000 to build it. Powers says the main reason he’s raising money is not to pay his salary — though he does have quite a bit of technical work to do, even if he is drawing on older work. He says he’s raising funds because he wants to make sure there’s really a demand for a system like Trsst.
“If you believe in it,” he sats, “back it.”
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/trsst/
