Twister: The Fully Decentralized P2P Microblogging Platform 169
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."
Quick! Give this guy a billion dollars! (Score:1, Funny)
Tech bubble anyone?
Re:Quick! Give this guy a billion dollars! (Score:5, Informative)
Tech bubble anyone?
From the twister FAQ [twister.net.co]:
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?
Re:Quick! Give this guy a billion dollars! (Score:5, Funny)
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" :)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
My definition of Tech Bubble: Your business doesn't have to generate revenue in order to grab an investment for a few billion.
This guy can sell himself as the next generation of Twitter: "We use BitCoin technologies to enable Scalable Microblogging" :)
I think you are confusing "tech bubble" with technobabble [urbandictionary.com].
Re: (Score:2)
The author states "I have a full time job so you might want to know that twister is a hobby."
So WTF are you even on about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Give him bitcoins instead :D /. article this year so far.
This is definitely my favorite
Hopefully it's better than the last one (Score:2)
Twister, the not so intersting story of some researchers and a tornado. You can't fool me again!
Woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)
2500 users is impressive. That's about half the size of all Linux desktop users, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I worked as a contractor on an IBM project a year or two ago. I have to say that my experience backs your post up. All of the desktops were Windows based. The servers were Linux, but that was mandated by the customer.
Even worse, we were not allowed to use open source components unless they had been approved by IBM's legal department. We got into the ridiculous situation that we had to change our code coverage tool from one that was based on the GPL to one that wasn't even though the instrumented code it
Re: (Score:2)
Classic IBM.
Yeah... (Score:1)
He used to write kernel code before his brain got injured, and now he's an app designer for it instead :D
Re: (Score:2)
Financial industry still uses it a ton, and IBM is still convinced that Websphere on AIX is a solid way to go.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This explains a lot,
Guys leave this guy alone... He is "special" and he can not actually understand complex things like "puters" or "english"
Re: (Score:1)
Registered? (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you register a username in a fully decentralized environment?
Re:Registered? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Which means you can do a "double spend" attack to appropriate a specific username?
Re: (Score:2)
so if you're too stupid to keep your login data private, say goodbye.
FTFY, and yes.
Re: username/password are hacked (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
The same way you claim a bitcoin in a fully decentralzed environment: You say, "this is mine", and wait for enough people to agree with you.
You put it in a block in the chain (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:You put it in a block in the chain (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Good point! (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [google.com] 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.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps they could make it computationally expensive to create a new identity somehow - like when you solve bitcoins. Something short enough that a motivated user wouldn't mind waiting but which would be expensive enough to stop mass creations.
Re:Good point! (Score:5, Informative)
"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)."
Then perhaps you'd like to post this as well:
Twister will never see widespread adoption if users have to compile it for their platform. Unless and until pre-compiled binaries are available, most people will avoid it like the plague.
Re: (Score:2)
Then perhaps you'd like to post this as well:
Twister will never see widespread adoption if users have to compile it for their platform. Unless and until pre-compiled binaries are available, most people will avoid it like the plague.
Sure, Firefox never got widespread adoption. I happen to remember when we had to compile it (it was called Phoenix back then).
Re: (Score:2)
I must say, though, that this thing is a bear to build on my Kubuntu 12.10 machine. I'm not done yet, and I don't see the end in site. It is _not_ a simple ./configure make make install make clean, and the engine that does the work is a separate package from the UI (which runs in a web broswer)!
Re: (Score:3)
I happen to remember when we had to compile it (it was called Phoenix back then).
It also wasn't widespread back then...
Re: (Score:2)
That is my point. All projects start off this way.
Re: (Score:2)
I was speaking of the future. But even now, if they want lots of beta testers, pre-compiled binaries are still the way to get more people involved.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be a good move to get it in to the Raspbian repos, as that's now the dominant distro for Raspberry Pi. There's plenty of under-utilised rPi boards in the world which would be suitable local terminals in to Twister.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
They have a complicated bitcoin like system to approve user registry, and provide incentives to "mine" in order to keep the system moving and deliver messages. It seems a bit odd to me - why bother with all that complexity and instead build into the system a way to quickly determine false aliases? Your user name is whatever you say it is, your identification uses standard signed credentials. Your "identity" in this system is your user name and post history. That's your identity - if the user name change
Centralized internet is coming to an end (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Secure, auditable, and distributed or downright personal servers should be the way of the future
How do you secure and audit any other server than your own?
Re: (Score:2)
NNTP? (Score:1)
If only there was a protocol for replicating posts across multiple servers & providers.
Compare to Freenet? Tor? i2p? GnuNet? etc (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
a good thing in a social network
What if you instead called it a "publishing platform"?
Same problem Bitcoin will have (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:3)
not even for the cat pics and videos?
Re:Same problem Bitcoin will have (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Same problem Bitcoin will have (Score:4, Informative)
But that's 100MB per million users, it all adds up.
FYI, twitter has 883 million users.. that's a lot of 100 bytes. 88 gigs worth of them.
Re: (Score:1)
This service won't get more than a few 10s of thousands of users. So your concerns are highly exaggerated.
Re: (Score:1)
But it's nice to think about large or maximum limits of any system.
Re: (Score:1)
This isn't really a problem. As with bitcoin the entire blockchain will not be needed by every client to verify. in the extreme you have everyone on earth with a login name, say 7e9. That's 700 GB. So the whole blockchain with everyone on the planet fits on a 1 TB drive. More than enough people will be willing to do that to maintain working infrastructure. As long as you can verify posters identities with a fraction of that it will work.
Re:Same problem Bitcoin will have (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a funded KickStarter in progress called Trsst [trsst.com] that has very similar goals, but uses a different approach. It's not quite as distributed as this, but avoids the monster blockchain problem.
Re: (Score:2)
In case you haven't been reading teh news for the last year, the world has changed. Also, if the security either of these projects is using fails, we have much larger problems than people reading our messages.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Same problem Bitcoin will have (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Apropos of nothing, where are you getting this meme?
I only ask because it doesn't happen to be true [bitcoin.it], yet it's an oft-repeated meme that everyone seems to put forth as the BitCoin "killer" flaw.
tl;dr Here's the relevant passage from that link:
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. [...] the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.
If one wanted to kill an idea, if one wanted to wage a propaganda war on an extreme viewpoint or tool, here is one way to do it.
It certainly seems plausible given the basics. Every transaction will add to the blockchain, and we process a whopping-big number of financial transactions every day! The blockchain will soon become unmanageable, and BitCoin will fail!
I've seen this in other arenas, including politics. Al Gore invented the internet [snopes.com] for instance. He didn't, he never said that he did, but he did say something vaguely similar. It certainly seems plausible that this is what he did say, and boy what a gaff! It makes him look sooooo silly!
We should promote our own agenda this way - the UK spam filter, for instance. What right risible meme can we invent that is close enough to reality that people would find it plausible, repeat it, and use it to label the filter as badly conceived?
Let's use the the same techniques our opponents use. Human psychology, for the win.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the theory - how is it working out in practice? That's the real question.
Of course, you display the same methodology in supporting your idea - positing simplified and idealized circumstances and then treating said meme as reality.
Y
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't been enough of a problem in practice for anybody to bother to write the code to shrink the storage.
You do realize that Bitcoin is an actual deployed system that carries a huge transaction volume, right? That's the practice.
Re: (Score:2)
If one wanted to kill an idea, if one wanted to wage a propaganda war on an extreme viewpoint or tool, here is one way to do it.
Of course, you display the same methodology in supporting your idea - positing simplified and idealized circumstances and then treating said meme as reality.
Let's use the the same techniques our opponents use.
You're already doing it - your blinders are just too tight for you to see it. People rarely notice logical flaws when they accrue to their favor.
Whaddaya mean - "not see it"? I'm doing it actively, with that intent in a carefully thought-out manner. I'm literally experimenting with propaganda techniques, using this forum for feedback and in anticipation of the upcoming election (November). I'm trying to learn how to manipulate public opinion.
Is that bad?
tl;dr: Whoosh!
Re:Same problem Bitcoin will have (Score:4, Informative)
well... (Score:2)
This is neat. But, I'll be honest, I don't want to compile anything. At the very least give me an android APK or better yet get it on the play store.
Re:well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
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.
However, non-jail-broken (can't I just say jailed?) iOS violates that definition.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, it says "can be compiled for Linux, Mac, and Android". What about Windows?
Perhaps, since Microsoft sends security bugs to the NSA before fixing them [bloomberg.com], this guy just figures it is frivolous to pretend you can have secure messaging on that platform.
Re: (Score:2)
It's like like they're only targeting free operating systems, as Mac somehow made the list.
More likely: the author happens to develop on Linux, Mac and/or Android and once it compiled there, the others came for free. Since adding Windows support usually requires a bunch of workarounds and rewrites, we'll have to wait until the effort's been put in.
Re: (Score:1)
As the Windows port of Twister doesn't exist, how about using Linux through a VM and running Twister that way. It's a lot faster than waiting around for a Windows port or installing a fresh copy of Linux.
Re:well... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the APK is just a client that gives an Android interface to your server.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Awesome, thanks!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:May there be many more (Score:4, Informative)
Mmm... social networking and telecommunications on a decentralised network with no way of inserting advertising
Actually, it does. From the FAQ [twister.net.co]:
Can I mine Bitcoins with twister?
Not exactly. The same mechanism used in Bitcoin for mining is also used in twister but for a different purpose, ensuring the order in which user registrations took place (the nickname belongs to whoever registered it first). twister network must incentive users to mine, so block chain may keep advancing. However, unlike Bitcoin, there is no monetary value involved. The twister incentive is: whoever finds the hash collision to validate a new block of transactions will be awarded with the right to send a promoted message. Promoted messages have a certain probability of being displayed by twister client.
Promoted messages? Am I going to be flooded with SPAM?
No, I hope not. I don’t like promoted message any more than you do, but I believe that a fair balance between the allowed volume of promoted messages will not upset the users while providing a good incentive for people to run the twister infrastructure.
Currently there is a maximum of one promoted message to be shown every 8 hours for every client, but the exact policy to be used is meant to be decided by the community.
The mechanism is actually quite democratic. Anyone can start generating blocks to send promoted messages, so this is effectively an advertising mechanism reaching the entire population of twister users. While an entrepreneur may invest in a mining rig to announce his product, a non-profit organization may ask his supporters to use their own personal computers to increase the probability of spreading their message.
Trademark Infringement Lawsuit (Score:1)
As soon as this thing gets big enough for people to start using it, Twitter is going to throw a pile of lawyers at this guy. Twister clearly infringes on Twitter's trademark, as it does the same thing and has a name intended to cause confusion.
Re: (Score:2)
Good luck: the guy is based in Brazil. Also, the technology is completely different, and the network cannot be stopped now that it's been started. And to be honest, I can't see the likes of Kanye West ever touching this sort of thing, so there is no confusion whatsoever... Twitter would have everything to lose (in terms of bad PR) and nothing to gain from a lawsuit against a hobbyist Brazilian developer; considering the delicate state of US-Brazil relationship after the NSA leaks, the political world would
Windows? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the users who'd want a windows client will be using it on their phones anyway.
tent.io (Score:2)
What I said about Twitter (Score:2)
A while ago I said Twitter should be an RFC, not a company. Nice to see that somebody is doing that kind of thing. The catch is adoption. If most people don't adopt, it doesn't work. An in-browser client written in JavaScript would help that, if it's possible. In the 21st century, people have gotten used to the idea that you don't have to download a client for each protocol. Yeah, it sucks to have everything in the browser sometimes; but that's reality.
Re: (Score:2)
Twister has a local daemon which handles connections and serves an HTML UI. So yeah, the interface is in-browser, but you still need a background client: it's the price of total decentralisation. (this said, once technologies like WebRTC mature, it might be possible to implement all of it in-browser, but I wouldn't hold my breath).
The REAL problem with this approach (Score:1, Interesting)
For distributed, peer-to-peer solutions to work well, many users MUST allow significant storage on their own machines. Without such storage, P2P solutions will lack a 'history', making them unsuitable for anything BUT instantaneous services like file transfer and Instant Messaging.
But why not a P2P, distributed forum, for instance. The forum database itself would be distributed (with a statistically appropriate level of redundancy/duplication) across storage on individual users machines. HDD storage has nev
"Fully Decentralized" (Score:2)
Nothing is ever "fully decentralized" until the internet itself is a giant mesh network.
Foretold! (Score:2)
Well, not exactly [slashdot.org]
I'm expecting something like this to topple Facebook.
With a terabyte of storage on a handheld device and a local application, you could replicate FB's service without the ads, limitations and privacy issues.
it depends on boost (Score:2)
i just threw up a bit in my mouth
I hope you use /. style random-user moderation (Score:4, Interesting)
Last time I checked, /. comments could be rated
by randomly selected [registered] readers,
I hope you've got a similar scheme i Twister...?
ouch! (Score:2)
My phone is about to catch on fire! It is actually uncomfortably hot to the touch running the twister server -- some sort of CPU usage regulation would be nice. Love the idea.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
True. I'd like to think that if there were a form of unstoppable, truly private communication that terrorists could use the NSA would give up, but that's Defense Distributed-type thinking...more likely you'd just be put on the Very Naughty list and they'll hit you with every tool of surveillance and oppression in the toolbox.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you drive around with your cellphone battery in? If so, you're GPS tracking yourself.
Re:What this will be used for (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Strawman arguments are lies.
So are cakes [knowyourmeme.com](*).
What's your point?
(*) Apparently - I'm only getting this from the internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah do we really want freedom if the price is COPYRIGHT INFRINGMENT!? Oh noes! Better lock ourselves in the panopticon before somebody gets to hear a shitty pop song without paying for it!
Re: (Score:2)
This seems like something I've heard of before, wasn't it called UseNet?
How soon can I start getting my movies / tv series through that delivery method? The 140 character limit is going to be an interesting challenge.
Re: (Score:2)
This seems like something I've heard of before, wasn't it called UseNet?
Nothing to fear. The geek will write a client app that no ordinary mortal will ever be able to use.
Re: (Score:2)
You know, that was my thought too. I think bittorrent is an excellent way to manage file distribution but 99% of the 1% of people who have heard of it think it is just for getting something illegal. I think Tor is an excellent system that should be directly sponsored by freedom loving countries all around the world as a way to battle oppressive and tyrannical governments, but instead it's seen as a terrorist and druggie tool.
If a tool can be used to give the people power to bypass an oppressive government,
Re: (Score:2)
Good thought. I should know more about the history of Tor. I checked Wikipedia and got "Originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which had been instrumental in the early development of onion routing under the aegis of DARPA, Tor was financially supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2004 to 2005."
I was thinking of the more recent NSA activity [cnet.com]
Re: (Score:2)
mod parent insightful. The comparison to USENET is important for younger readers to consider. 'The Man' was and is afraid of USENET. For reasons concisely stated by the the parent post.
It's like Diaspora; Usenet is for full discussions (Score:3)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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