You’ve all seen the news rounds the last couple of weeks with the flood of info about the huge amounts of data that Cambridge Analytica had been caught red-handed draining from Facebook. Over 50 million profiles were successfully extracted and Facebook didn’t notice (or, more likely, didn’t want to notice) a thing until the whole thing was outed in the press by a whistleblower.
What you might’ve missed in all this flurry was how exactly Cambridge Analytics managed to vacuum up all that information. Rather than a hack, or anything like that, they simply made use of an app which a lot of users installed on their phone. The app connected to people’s Facebook profiles and, in exchange for a little bit of snooping around your profile, it promised to give you some insights into your own personality, likes and dislikes. A true fair-ground crystal ball fortune teller with some feel-good insights. Turns out that just like some of the fairgrounds fortune-tellers, it didn’t just snoop around your own profile, it went in and ransacked the thing wholesale and not only for data on you, but your wife or husband, parents, kids, parents, friends, and anyone else you might’ve friended on Facebook. It then took all this treasure trove of information about you, and anyone you ever said ‘hi’ to, and sent it over to the unsavoury characters at Cambridge Analytica All that so that the app could spit out a textbox saying you’ve “a contemplative personality type”.
Sounds like a pretty shabby deal, doesn’t it?
How would you feel about forking over more info, in fact, you know what, ALL of your online info. I’m talking everything you ever did, everything that you did on Tinder just before you guiltilty deleted before getting home from work, the porn you’re watching, all the inside jokes you’ve got going on with your best friends, or the dirty chat you’ve got going on with your wife. Maybe some pics you’d never like to see the light of day? Not to mention all of your bank information, emails, as well as anything else that’s ever travelled wavelengths from your Wi-Fi router or your cellphone tower to your laptop or smartphone. Scary thought. Now try to imagine paying for the privilege of having your information sold on, ‘monetized’ and occasionally turned over to law enforcement for robbing Scott Ridley, Taylor Swift and the likes of 0.001¢ in royalties. Shouldn’t be too hard, since you’re already forking over $50–150 a month for the experience. Yes, I’m talking about your Internet Service Provider. The Comcasts, AT&Ts, Time Warner Cables, Verizons, T-Mobiles and VirginMedias of the world — they’ve got you right the way they like it — bent over.
Makes the whole Facebook leak sound pretty nice now, doesn’t it? So what is there to do?
You might’ve heard of Tor, the Mozilla-based browser pack that’s supposed to help democracy activists living in oppressive regimes circumvent internet blocks and interception of their online activity. Trouble with that sort of stuff is that you’re not a pro-democracy protester living in China, and the network wasn’t built to handle your habit of streaming 1080p60fps videos while torrenting BluRay the latest season of GoT and Orange is the New Black. The whole thing is ridiculous and it makes you wish you were on dial-up again.
In comes SkyWire. This is a new internet. It’s founded and run by some of the same luminaries who were involved in the early development of crypto, like Synth (early Bitcoin developer), Houwu Chen (Ethereum co-founder). SkyWire is an internet that sits on top of your internet connection and on which your ISP cannot snoop in. It uses state-of-the-art encryption protocols such as Source Routing Link Layer Encryption which is virtually unbreakable but also much, much faster than old-school VPN networks.
Because SkyWire sits on top of your existing internet connection, there is no equipment, no messy wires to deal with and virtually no set-up, apart from installing the SkyWire software.
What’s even better is that the whole SkyWire internet is completely peer-to-peer and works with all the existing internet apps you might be using.
For example, currently, if you want to watch a video on Popcorn Time, your ISP will record that request and will either fetch the video from half-way across the world from wherever the server sits or it will pull it off a huge Content Distribution Network datacenter in the middle of rural Alabama and also leave a record of your activity in all these places. With SkyWire, if you want to watch the latest episode of whatever, the network will just find the nearest copy from someone else on the SkyWire network (might be the downstairs neighbour or someone in the same town) and anonymously serve that copy to you. No ISP, no Content Delivery Network, no Popcorn Time server. No man in the middle, no buffer and no privacy breach. Revolutionary.
How much is this going to cost?
Nothing. No, really — not a penny, dime, cent, eurocent, ruble or however you want to try to spin this. The project is funded by SkyCoin, which is something I’ll write in more depth in another article. Briefly, however, SkyCoin is Bitcoin without all the issues. Unlike Bitcoin, SkyCoin uses an improved algorithm called Obelisk which gives it in-built protection against Proof-of-Work/Stake attacks and the related transaction malleability issues that Bitcoin is vulnerable to. Simply put, when you use SkyWire, you spend SkyCoin (such as when you get that video from your downstairs neighbour, Dan), and when you help others use SkyWire (your computer giving Dan a copy of an ebook or simply serving a website he is trying to access), you earn SkyCoin. In essence, everyone is both a client and a server — a true mesh network. There is no mining, so none of those issues and the associated inflation, but if you want to earn more SkyCoin, you can always run a node (basically, a dedicated server in the network) and earn more SkyCoin that way. If you sign up for a node early, you also get a bonus.
However, while SkyWire uses SkyCoin to enable the invisible accounting behind the network, the coin and the network are independent and completely separate. SkyCoin is usable for any and all transactions and, unlike like Bitcoin is actually tied to, but can survive with, something that has real-world value and application.
Go ahead, #DeleteFacebook and #GoSkyWire