[Cryptography] Everything

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Mon Oct 24 11:19:01 EDT 2022


As you might have heard, Elon Musk has declared that his purchase of
Twitter may be the thing that leads to the emergence of the Everything app.

I think he might be correct. Just not in the way he intended.

I already have a cryptographic platform designed to secure any type of
synchronous or asynchronous communication that is designed as an open
infrastructure that gives people the ability to choose and change their
service providers. With a Mesh callsign, Alice is @alice for life, not
alice at example.com and dependent on example.com continuing to service her
account.

So I wrote up an application layer for the Mesh describing how it can be
used to support every modality of communication with very very little
overhead:

Mathematical Mesh 3.0 Part X: Everything (ietf.org)
<https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-hallambaker-everything-00.html>

The name of the app is of course Everything.

By far the biggest objection to Everything is of course 'will anyone use
it'. And I really don't know. Like the Web, the underlying technology is
not entirely new. The architecture is basically Dave Winer's RSS cast in a
more modern approach based on append only logs. Oh and with end to end
cryptography built into the core.

So if you want to have a forum to discuss something, you can end-to-end
encrypt the whole thing. The service never sees the plaintext of any
message, the key server only ever has threshold shares.

Why now? Well the last time we had a push for something like this
when PubSubHubbub was launched, Facebook was on the rise. The social media
giants already had the momentum on their side and had not yet committed the
monumental abuses of trust that we saw in 2016 with the Zuck deliberately
prioritizing hate speech and disinformation to line his own pockets.

Musk's purchase of Twitter will cause tens of millions of people to look
for something else. And an Everything client is a something else that can
provide access to everything in the old world, RSS, Mastodon, even Facebook
and Twitter and also provide access to a single consistent and seamless
communication environment.

The other problem I see with PubSubHubbub is that it only did one thing and
if we are going to really meet people's needs we need to do it all. If I am
interacting with people in this list, why should I need to move to a
different infrastructure and client to respond to someone with a chat
message or a phone call?

The dirty secret that none of the Web conferencing and messaging platforms
are really letting on about is that WebRTC already does all the heavy
lifting for turning a messaging/chat type app into a voice or video calling
app.

At this point I have specifications and code for almost all of the protocol
layer. I am just working on completing a transport layer that supports the
needs of the presence service protocol efficiently (and that might well
turn out to be something QUIC can do instead).

Any help anyone is willing to lend in reviewing specs, testing out
applications or providing code would be very welcome.
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