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This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.
- megamark16 15y agoI would love to see this as a Kickstarter project. This is the kind of movement that I feel could really benefit from having a community behind it, and I for one would love to be a part of that community. Shoot, I'd even offer to donate my services to help see it become a reality.
- Atomus 15y agoTotally agree. Also worth a mention is the JOBS act. Though controversial, the crowdsourcing part would help Merrill's ISP start-up grow much quicker and would be, IMO, more effective than Kickstarter, since your average Joe would be investing into something that could potentially be big. I, for one, will be keeping my eye out for this guy and will definitely invest into his idea for customer privacy.
- there 15y agoThe fellow in the article said on Reddit that Kickstarter won't allow his project, but he's started one on an alternative site. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/s479x/this_internet_provider_pledges_to_put_your/c4b00yj http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/s479x/this_inter... http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx
- walexander 15y agoI would love to see this guy succeed, but can anyone enlighten me as to why Kickstarter won't allow his project to be funded? His pseudo-kickstart page is unlikely to generate anywhere near the amount of funding it would on the KS site. I'm wondering why they wouldn't allow it to be funded there. Is there something dubious about this project that the typical tech blog cheerleaders are ignoring, or is there some reason this kind of project is not allowed on Kickstarter in general?
- dangrossman 15y ago> This project’s goal is to raise funds for my nonprofit organization, Calyx Institute, which will launch a privacy-focused Internet Service Provider and mobile phone service using end-to-end encryption technology. http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx http://www.indiegogo.com/calyx -- > A project is not open-ended. Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project. No charity or cause funding. http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines
- BHSPitMonkey 15y agoI don't really see it that way. The startup cost for a new business is a one-time, finite "project" (in my mind) that would adhere to the concept of Kickstarter well. The problem Kickstarter has with this project (and, similarly, when I tried to do the same thing) is that it's not an "artistic" endeavor. That is to say, they don't allow small business projects, unless you plan on producing a short story or documentary about the process as you do it. (Here's an entrepreneur who used this exact loophole: http://kck.st/rtglLo http://kck.st/rtglLo)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- losethos 15y agoGod says... fouls supposing abandonedly quickenest rashness beat qualified doings despised structure student accuser VIII Ghost sighed bathe forbear judges furnish I_don't_care hills ointments bidden maintainers inevitably station alas colours perpetual trusting unfailingly California once_upon_a_time dryness eminently occasion Nothing yielded NUMBER comprised contrition patiently tame
- amalag 15y agoIsn't a large problem with ISP's the last mile, fiber or cable, which is very expensive? This is purely wireless? I have a 15Mb cable connection for $50 month (after taxes). FIOS is $30 more. Will he partner with these physical carriers or purely go wireless?
- ibejoeb 15y agoYes, it seems he plans to be entirely wireless. It was compared in the article to Clear's 4G WiMAX service augmented with ubiquitous encryption.
- uxp 15y agoHe could also piggyback over existing copper/fiber owned by the large telcos. It's allowed by law even. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carrier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carr...
- excuse-me 15y agoSo? They still have your credit card details to pay for the service, your cell phone location, the recipient of each email and the web pages you visited. The actual contents of the emails is pretty much irrelevant- I'm pretty sure that international terrorists probably use code. I'm also pretty sure that having one of these accounts and a series of logs showing your access to online gambling or movie sharing sites or banks in the Caymans is going to trip the same alarm bells.
- sounds 15y agoI want Calyx to succeed. I really do. But you said it: there's still too much identifying information left on the table. There's another angle that threatens Calyx, too: they're just one rider on a "must-pass" bill away from being shut down and tied up in court. Or worse, made to _silently_ monitor your traffic after all their publicity about their privacy. National Security Letters make it clear: the gag orders mean even if Nick Merrill wanted to tell you his company had been compromised, he wouldn't be able to. There does seem to be a technical workaround, known as a "canary," where Nick Merrill posts a daily message far and wide signed from an air-gapped physically-secure private key that basically says, "Today is 11/Apr/2012. Under penalty of perjury, I have not been served with any legal threats." Thus, the day the "canary" stops appearing, it becomes obvious what has happened; it seems that our current legal climate probably cannot compel him to _commit_ perjury, and his _inaction_ in posting his "canary" does not constitute a violation of any gag order; ironically, he conforms to it and by so doing alerts his customers to the problem. Problems with this approach include: • All the sites he has been using for the canary could get shut down simultaneously a la Megaupload • Compromise of his private key • Dwindling interest by his customers in checking multiple sits every day, even if the process can be mostly automated
- excuse-me 15y agoWhen your opposition can legally order predator strikes on you, imprison you indefinately without charge, torture you in it's own military prisons and secretly ship you off to 3rd world prisons for more torture - then I don't think little legal tricks like reverse canaries are really going to work.
- coverband 15y agoI don't think too much about whether this endeavor would be successful. It's more important to me that someone makes a stand and is able to convince other like-minded people to join him for a principle. I'm just glad to see that he decided to be more courageous than most of us and believed that he should be doing the right thing instead of the easy thing by refusing to hand over his client's information.
- Shank 15y agoThough the odds are stacked against him, I hope it at least sets a precedent for other companies to follow. I'd pay for an ISP that promised this with reasonable speeds - though I doubt his project will be able to gain traction outside of the launching market.
- cnbeuiwx 15y agoGood idea but you cant trust anyone but yourself. The United States is a prison from now on.
- bostonvaulter2 15y agoIs there any way we can contribute to or sign up for notifications on this?
- mdaniel 14y agoThe fundraising site allows one to contribute any amount, so you could contribute $1 and would then be "a contributor" and presumably would receive status updates.
- DrDeke 15y agoYou need licensed spectrum to run a facilities-based cell phone service. Any good ideas on how this guy is gonna acquire some?
- CrazedGeek 15y agoHe doesn't necessarily need to -- Calyx could operate as an MVNO of one of the major mobile networks.
- SkyMarshal 15y ago> "Merrill has formed an advisory board with members including Sascha Meinrath from the New America Foundation; former NSA technical director Brian Snow; and Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project." I find that interesting. Indication of dissension in the ranks of the NSA over how far to take domestic surveillance?
- kijin 15y agoformer NSA technical director. AFAIK he's been "former" for quite a few years now.
- rdl 15y agoI like the idea, and I especially like the idea of a 501c3 (which subsidizes the added costs over commercial baseline) coupled with a commercial company (which charges normal rates for service. You can go a reasonably long way with just best practice privacy policy (requiring court orders, keeping minimal records, locking down configs, obfuscating IPs, not intentionally compromising privacy), but there are a couple issues. One, a lot of big ISPs (from what I've read) are only profitable due to selling clickstreams or other privacy-invading things. So a privacy-protecting ISP will cost more for the same service (or, will offer crappier bandwidth). Second, once you move beyond this level of security, you're trying to defeat traffic analysis, and then targeted attacks. Targeted attacks are probably out of scope (and really expensive to defend against), but defending against traffic analysis usually requires burning a lot of bandwidth, or scheduling or routing communications in strange ways (which adds latency in various ways). This makes things REALLY expensive, and especially for wireless systems, uses up the finite spectrum capacity. Ultimately the best way to really protect privacy is to structure applications to be message based, tolerant of latency on the order of hours, and basically non-interactive. This is the opposite of how ~everything is done on the web -- email is probably the only widely deployed application which works like this, and that's why email has the best anti-traffic-analysis systems out there (mixmaster/mixminion remailers). Plus, there's a big problem with declaring yourself "the ISP for people who want to be anonymous" -- it self-selects, especially if it's a small pool of users due to higher cost, into a great target. Either the organization itself is evil and secretly monitoring, or just becomes a hacker/government target (which could involve monitoring on the perimeter/upstream). The best model is some combination of making privacy protection a default feature of protocols, having a bunch of different vendors (which may advertise better privacy) to choose from, and having technical systems which can provably protect your secrets against various kinds of threats. It's a bunch of medium and hard problems. The biggest problem is that 99.99% of users totally don't care, though.
- rlpb 15y agoThe authorities will simply obtain details from credit card companies and other financial institutions to get lists of all of Calyx's customers. All of their customers will be treated with suspicion. Being a customer of Calyx may even become probable cause. I don't like this, but this is what I think will happen.
- gnosis 14y ago"The authorities will simply obtain details from credit card companies and other financial institutions to get lists of all of Calyx's customers." Not if they accept bitcoin, or some other anonymous currency.
- rlpb 14y agoBitcoin is not anonymous. It's the opposite. Every transaction is public. And how do you propose to obtain the bitcoin in the first place?
- bostonvaulter2 14y agoWow, only 6 days and this link is already broken.