bitgroup

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These days the issue of privacy online is becoming more and more important as we hear about the shocking extent to which organisations like the NSA are violating people's privacy and the giant corporations like Facebook and Google are misusing our personal information. Social networks have become an important tool for people from diverse locations and cultures to get together and organise, but when this organisation is used for purposes that oppose this corporate and government oppression it gets shut down. It's become very apparent to many people that a new form of social networking tool is required that meets a number of important criteria.

Free and open source: For it to gain widespread use and be as accessible as possible to all people like Facebook and Google applications are it must be completely free. But it's very important that the source code be available for peer review so that the users can be satisfied that it's secure and there's no nasty tricks involved such as misuse of personal information of "back doors" through the security systems.

Peer-to-peer: One of the big problems we're starting to see nowadays is that the centralised model of setting up sites on a web-server for the users to access is not very resilient. We're seeing many sites that start of with great ideals when it comes to upholding peoples rights to privacy, but when they become too popular they come under attack by "the global agenda" by being accused of aiding child pornography or "supporting terrorism". They're then forced by law to turn over their user's data or face being prosecuted and shut down. However there are some online applications and services which have come under attack but have not been successfully shut down such as The Pirate Bay and other file sharing applications and the Bitcoin crypto-currency. Although these applications are considered a major problem from the perspective of the global agenda, it's so far proven impossible to do anything about them. The reason is that they have no central point of attack, shutting down accounts or servers or prosecuting people has no effect on these systems. It's for this reason that it's absolutely necessary for us, the people, to have access to a new social networking tool that is completely peer-to-peer.

Supports privacy and anonymity: Another thing that has been growing in importance a lot over the last few years is the ability for users to maintain their anonymity when working online. It's rapidly becoming a violation of law simply to voice opinion that opposes the status quo, which is in itself ample reason, or even a moral obligation, to oppose it! It's important for people who oppose this draconian system to be able to do so anonymously, especially in exceedingly oppressive countries that don't allow basic freedom of speech rights such as China and the USA.

Bitmessage

Anyone whose thought seriously about developing a any kind of peer-to-peer application that has more than basic file sharing functionality will know that there are some extremely difficult challenges to overcome, particularly when it comes to the "sign up/sign in" and the ability for many users to "subscribe" to information. There are many complex issues involved in security and content distribution which are orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish in a system where there are no fixed servers, and every peer must be considered as a potentially hostile to the network.

The first application which has really made headway in moving the world of peer-to-peer beyond the simple file-sharing application is the Bitcoin crypto-currency. The fact that it's financially oriented creates much more motivation for attackers to try and exploit any weakness in it, but it has stood up to everything the hackers and the governments with their billions of dollars have thrown at it. Now a few years down the track, the Bitcoin code is starting to be used in other more diverse applications such as in the Namecoin alternative domain name system and the Bitmessage secure anonymous messaging system.

Bitmessage is of particular interest because messaging is a very general application that can be used as the foundation for many other applications - social networking being one of them. And that's what the odSocial project is about, building the foundations of a secure peer-to-peer anonymous social network using Bitmessage as it's fundamental communications through which users and groups are formed and connected.