There is not any background on the website. Like who is that society, who is behind it, what is the goal of the app, where comes the funding from. Why for example did you not fund Signal? It has similar goals?
There should be a link to the society website (https://openprivacy.ca/) on the Cwtch site, but I can see that there isn't - we will get that fixed.
Open Privacy Research Society is a Canadian non profit society, founded in 2018, you can find details of our members and operating structure on our website. Most of our funds come from individual donations.
Cwtch started as an extension to the Ricochet Tor messenger which I also contributed back in 2014/2015. Our main goal behind Cwtch was to establish that metadata resistant / p2p communication could be done in a similar form factor to traditional server based / non-metadata private protocols like Signal i.e. to try and push the privacy properties that people can wield beyond end to end encryption, in a way that is still usable.
TL;DR: Have you already written about OR off the top of your head what are some of the hard problems in usable decentralised metadata resistant communication that your project and others tackle and intend to tackle in future?
Hi Sarah. My layperson understanding is that Cwtch is where you research and implement metadata-resistant infrastructure for communication tools and by extension where you find the acceptable trade-offs for open questions in usable privacy-enhancements.
My memory might deceive me, but I feel like there used to be an "open questions" section in the documentation that I can no longer find? Anyway, sorry for the rambling but the question I wanted to ask is: have you already written about OR off the top of your head what are some of the hard problems in usable decentralised metadata resistant communication that your project and others tackle and intend to tackle in future? Is there anywhere we can read about these sort of things to keep up to date on developments? Nowadays it is very easy for projects to claim exceptional privacy or absolute privacy partly because accurate awareness of limits, trade-offs and state-of-the-art is not common knowledge in some communities.
There is not any background on the website. Like who is that society, who is behind it, what is the goal of the app, where comes the funding from. Why for example did you not fund Signal? It has similar goals?
There should be a link to the society website (https://openprivacy.ca/) on the Cwtch site, but I can see that there isn't - we will get that fixed.
Open Privacy Research Society is a Canadian non profit society, founded in 2018, you can find details of our members and operating structure on our website. Most of our funds come from individual donations.
Cwtch started as an extension to the Ricochet Tor messenger which I also contributed back in 2014/2015. Our main goal behind Cwtch was to establish that metadata resistant / p2p communication could be done in a similar form factor to traditional server based / non-metadata private protocols like Signal i.e. to try and push the privacy properties that people can wield beyond end to end encryption, in a way that is still usable.
TL;DR: Have you already written about OR off the top of your head what are some of the hard problems in usable decentralised metadata resistant communication that your project and others tackle and intend to tackle in future?
Hi Sarah. My layperson understanding is that Cwtch is where you research and implement metadata-resistant infrastructure for communication tools and by extension where you find the acceptable trade-offs for open questions in usable privacy-enhancements.
My memory might deceive me, but I feel like there used to be an "open questions" section in the documentation that I can no longer find? Anyway, sorry for the rambling but the question I wanted to ask is: have you already written about OR off the top of your head what are some of the hard problems in usable decentralised metadata resistant communication that your project and others tackle and intend to tackle in future? Is there anywhere we can read about these sort of things to keep up to date on developments? Nowadays it is very easy for projects to claim exceptional privacy or absolute privacy partly because accurate awareness of limits, trade-offs and state-of-the-art is not common knowledge in some communities.
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I saw a minor accident while skimming the documentation. Briar's summary in https://docs.cwtch.im/security/intro#a-brief-history-of-meta... says, "while providing resistant to metadata surveillance". Looks like resistance would fit better there.