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"That is kind of terrifying," he suggests.Ĭapsule would seek to route around the risk of mass deplatforming via "easy to deploy" P2P microservices - starting with a forthcoming web app. "When you deploy Capsule right now - I have a prototype that does almost nothing running - it's basically one binary. And you get that binary and you deploy it and you run it, and that's it. It sets up a server, it contacts Let's Encrypt, it gets you a certificate, it uses SQLite for the database, which is a serverless database, all of the assets for the web server are within the binary," he says, walking through the "really nice technical idea" that snagged $100,000 in pre-seed backing insanely fast. "There are no other files - and then once you have it running, in that folder when you set up your capsule server, it's just the Capsule program and a Capsule database that is a file. And that is so self-contained that it's embeddable everywhere, that's migratable - and it's really quite impossible to get this level of simplicity and elegance so quickly unless you go this route. As an alternative, nongovernmental organizations could set up their own Cryptocat servers, Kobeissi said.Then, for the mesh federation thing, we're just doing HTTPS calls and then having decentralized caching of the databases and so on."Īmong the Twitter back-and-forth about how (or whether) Kobeissi's concept differs to various other decentralized protocols, someone posted a link to this XKCD cartoon - which lampoons the techie quest to resolve competing standards by proposing a tech that covers all use cases (yet is of course doomed to increase complexity by +1).
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Tiny packages containing Raspberry Pis and the Cryptocat server software could also be sent to regions in need. He’s also planning to purchase some of the US$25-$35 Raspberry Pi mini-computers under development by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
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There already is an add-on application for Google’s Chrome browser, and Kobeissi expects to release native applications for iOS and Android later this year. Kobeissi has plans for quite a few Cryptocat improvements.
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By using a “.onion” URL for Cryptocat, the Cryptocat server will not know the users’ true IP addresses, Kobeissi said.
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A user creates a chat session, picks a nickname and then types a random string of characters in order to generate the 256-bit AES encryption keys for the public key cryptography system it uses.Ĭryptocat’s code is open source, and Kobeissi has published details on how its encryption works in order to get feedback from other cryptology specialists.Īs an added security measure, Cryptocat is compatible with TOR (The Onion Router), a worldwide network that make web surfing more anonymous by randomly routing traffic through its servers.
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First, one of its versions is web-based, so no application has to be downloaded. The beauty of Cryptocat is its simplicity. OTR must be downloaded, installed and configured, and both parties having a conversation must have it enabled in order for the messages to be encrypted. There are proven encryption technologies for instant messaging, such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and OTR (Off The Record), an add-on encryption program for IM applications such as Pidgin and Adium.īut PGP can be “difficult to use for people who aren’t computer geeks,” Kobeissi said. Messages are encrypted when transmitted, but those conversations are decrypted on the servers running those services, potentially allowing interlopers to record them. Many of those applications implement SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), an encryption protocol that underpins e-commerce transactions.
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