![]() ![]() Those who download the free software can create alternate e-mail addresses that are 36-character-long strings of letters and numbers. Unlike competing products, Bitmessage also shields the identity of the parties in any online communication. Before that, most of the people using the software were in China now more than 80 percent of downloads come from the U.S. Downloads of Bitmessage, which was introduced in November 2012, have more than quintupled since news broke in early June about NSA snooping, Warren says. Warren drew inspiration from Bitcoin, the open-source protocol that established a virtual currency. It would be much more difficult to block access to the Bitmessage network,” says Adam Melton, a developer who collaborated with Warren. “Right now, if the Iranian government wants to block Twitter or Gmail, they can. To retrieve a copy of an e-mail sent using Bitmessage, the government would have to gain access to an individual’s computer. Instead, the encryption software uses peer-to-peer technology that links computers into what is known as a distributed network. “If I wasn’t reasonably sure they were tracking our metadata, I wouldn’t have done it,” says the 28-year-old, who worked on Bitmessage in his spare time while employed at an educational company he declined to identify.īitmessage isn’t owned by a corporation, nor does it rely on a centralized server that can be accessed by the government. ![]() New York-based developer Jonathan Warren says he had the NSA and its spying techniques very much in mind when creating the software. That’s one reason a new open-source encryption standard called Bitmessage, which is out of the NSA’s reach and devilishly difficult to crack, is seeing a surge in users. Yet unless customers bother to read these programs’ service agreements, they may not realize these companies-just like tech giants Google ( GOOG) and Yahoo! ( YHOO)-honor requests for customer data made by governments and courts in cases involving potential security threats. ![]() Currently, the network processes more than a thousand private messages per day.Revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of the e-mails and phone records of Americans have been a boon to makers of commercial encryption programs such as Hushmail and Silent Circle. The software experienced a surge of new adoptions resulting from Edward Snowden's disclosure of the National Security Agency's email surveillance activities. The Bitmessage protocol avoids sender-spoofing through strong authentication, and hides metadata from wiretapping systems. Bitmessage encrypts each users' message inbox using strong encryption and replicates it inside its P2P network mixing it with inboxes of other users in order to conceal user's identity, prevent eavesdropping and protect the network from any control. ![]() "Bitmessage is a decentralized, encrypted, peer-to-peer, trustless communications protocol that can be used by one person to send encrypted messages to another person, or to multiple subscribers. = a decentralized, encrypted, peer-to-peer, trustless communications protocol that can be used by one person to send encrypted messages to another person ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |