I Fight for the Users

As a member of the Veilid Project team, DEFCON was a wild ride.

My full experience was that I arrived on Sunday as my wife was working for The Diana Initiative.  As we got to our room and I looked out the window, we had a spectacular view of the Sphere (it is an impressive thing to behold) and Caesars Forum... and for the rest of the week, I would find myself in a mental battle with the building that would be where we unleash Veilid upon the world.

I continued to vacillate between feelings of self-doubt and world domination.  How did I end up here?  A director of the Veilid Foundation, and some sort of imposter that was getting the childhood dream of working with cDc and bringing hackers.town's unique chemistry of talent and revelry to finally take the first big step to restoring the future.  The Rohan to their Gondor...

Those thoughts would steel me over the next five days, knowing what was coming.  We had done the legwork, the core development would finish up a mere 48 hours before we went full on DEFCON takeover mode, the party was planned, the talks were ready, and The Internet would never be the same again.

This all started back in January of 2020 when I heard the first rumblings about Veilid.

Many of you who know me from hackers.town know that I have long been quite vociferous about restoring the future and working to change the world.  I still believe in the early promise of the Internet, you know, before we all collectively decided someone else should handle everything, and it all went to shit.

At the time hackers.town had some regular meetings going on: a voice chat where we would bounce ideas off one another and think of ways to impact the arc of user privacy and protection.  This was largely due to my attendance of DEFCON in 2019, and a couple of talks that even further pushed me to want to make big impacts.  We had unique talents and reach that had come together in the culture of an emerging decentralized network, and Bruce Schneier saying "If it's for the public good, why are you waiting for permission?" may have instilled a tiny bit of insanity in me.

Projekt:ONI (Optimistic Nihilists Inc.) was born in this timeframe, and those calls we were having would lead to a regular (almost nightly for a while) cadence for us to start building simple things that anyone could use to ensure their privacy.  Dildog had noticed we were having these, and asked me to remind him, and he'd try to drop in someday...

In January, one cold Friday night, Dildog dropped in.  The whole room was stunned that our little cargo culting attempt at rekindling the hacker spirit into the world brought someone who did this before into the room.

I remember having to help drive the conversation, because I think most in that room were stunned into silence.  Dildog proceeded to lay down the idea of exchanging messages in a cryptographically secure manner in which the database was effectively a distributed hash table.  We talked for maybe 30 to 45 minutes, and the instant he left the room everyone was trying to grok the wisdom that had just been laid down...  Time would pass, and a (((pandemic))) would start.

Our community would end up helping save worlds side by side with other hacker cults over the next few years, helping to build one of the world's largest distributed super computers with r00t f0lds, and raising funds to save lives in the early days of the (((war in Ukraine))), even presenting at HOPE 2020.

During the pandemic, I made a trip to DEFCON in 2021... against all wisdom.

I needed to meet back up with my people.  It was a very small year due to the travel difficulties of the time.  But risk it we did.

Dildog introduced me to Medus4 (Katelyn Bowden) and TC.  It was clear that a team was starting to form, and the project actually started to take shape, and for the first time I could finally start to make out a path toward a future restored.  We brought together a team of volunteers and got to work.

We were going to do this and dent the universe.

Fast-forward a few years: August of 2023.

Veilid had been operational for a few months, and revisions and updates to get to somewhere between an alpha and beta state finally got finished just days before the Friday launch.  The party was planned, the team was onsite, and the hot dogs were in Veggie's possession.  Only now were we beginning to understand the level of excitement around this launch.  I had run a fundraiser a few months before, selling Veilid t-shirts to get money to fund this crazy excursion... and they were everywhere.  It's always surreal to see people you don't know wearing the markings of your thing... but this was at a whole new level.

Our little social media blitz had delivered.

What Is Veilid, You Ask?

The intent of the Veilid project and Veilid Foundation Inc. is to create a privacy centric network that enhances human privacy in communications.

We believe that the Internet has yet to fulfill the future role once promised and, as such, we refer to this new operating model as Web 1.5.  We want to enable people and developers to break free of the data silos that have so long monetized our information.

Personally, I see no separation between the data constructs that people generate in their communications and their physical person; they are both a part of you, so the idea that we can sign part of ourselves away via an End-User License Agreement (EULA) is, at its core, problematic.

Ultimately, we wanted a better option to support restoring the future we were promised when the web was young, and as such we consider this Web 1.5... what should have been.

Veilid is an application framework designed to allow developers to be privacy first.  Veilid is also a routing protocol that enhances the privacy of the users of the network.

It uses distributed hash tables for storage.  It is conceptually like IPFS plus Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services over a privately-routed network.  It enables development of fully-distributed applications without a "blockchain" or a "transactional layer" at their base.

Veilid can be included as part of user-facing applications or run as a "headless node" for power users who wish to help build the network.

In 1999, cDc showed up and asked you to show some control when they launched Back Orifice 2000...  Now we are telling you all to take back control.

You want to help take back the wires, and enshrine privacy as a human right?

Go to veilid.com/contribute and see if there is any way you can pitch in.

We need:

• Coders and hackers
• App developers
• Usability experts
• Translators
• Open-source governance
• Donations

Together, we can build a better, more private Internet.  Join us and help us restore the future!