<story><title>Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>rolleiflex</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m building a distributed network, called Aether, that allows people to create and participate in reddit-like forums anonymously. It&amp;#x27;s fully encrypted. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.getaether.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.getaether.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s cool because:&lt;p&gt;* It&amp;#x27;s anonymous. The posts jump from one node to another with no author information except a nickname. They cannot be traced back to the origin.&lt;p&gt;* It&amp;#x27;s encrypted with TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA cipher suite using 2048bit RSA keys. The connections most likely cannot be eavesdropped.&lt;p&gt;* It gives people an unfiltered, unmodified feed of information directly from the sources, with no intervention or censorship.&lt;p&gt;* It&amp;#x27;s unmoderated, so there is nobody that&amp;#x27;s deciding what you should and should not see. You can block people, however. Every client has a threshold of blocks for each node after which it stops showing that node to the user.&lt;p&gt;* Zero infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;This is a tool that can be used to either experience &amp;#x2F; exercise full free speech here in the west, or can be used for more essential two-way mass communication purposes where other venues are blocked, banned or self-censoring.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wfn</author><text>The thing that you&amp;#x27;re working on falls within the area of &amp;#x27;truly relevant and important [to our times, etc.] software&amp;#x27;, IMO. Very nice and interesting indeed.&lt;p&gt;I didn&amp;#x27;t notice any mention of an adversary model, do you have one? (cf. e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/27/how-does-tors-threat-model-differ-from-i2ps-threat-model/277#277&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;tor.stackexchange.com&amp;#x2F;questions&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-does-tors-thre...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;How transport-agnostic is the system aiming to be? Could it be used in combination with Tor&amp;#x2F;I2P&amp;#x2F;etc. (as an underlying transport&amp;#x2F;anonymization mechanism)? (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://syndie.de/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;syndie.de&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Overall, this is very interesting indeed.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>rolleiflex</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m building a distributed network, called Aether, that allows people to create and participate in reddit-like forums anonymously. It&amp;#x27;s fully encrypted. Take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.getaether.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.getaether.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s cool because:&lt;p&gt;* It&amp;#x27;s anonymous. The posts jump from one node to another with no author information except a nickname. They cannot be traced back to the origin.&lt;p&gt;* It&amp;#x27;s encrypted with TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA cipher suite using 2048bit RSA keys. The connections most likely cannot be eavesdropped.&lt;p&gt;* It gives people an unfiltered, unmodified feed of information directly from the sources, with no intervention or censorship.&lt;p&gt;* It&amp;#x27;s unmoderated, so there is nobody that&amp;#x27;s deciding what you should and should not see. You can block people, however. Every client has a threshold of blocks for each node after which it stops showing that node to the user.&lt;p&gt;* Zero infrastructure.&lt;p&gt;This is a tool that can be used to either experience &amp;#x2F; exercise full free speech here in the west, or can be used for more essential two-way mass communication purposes where other venues are blocked, banned or self-censoring.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scottlilly</author><text>I was thinking about doing something similar. One of the things I wanted to incorporate was an reputation ability (beyond just blocking). It would be similar to a referral engine in Netflix or Amazon.&lt;p&gt;So, I&amp;#x27;m user A. I mark user B as a high-value poster. User B marks user C as a high-value poster. When I run across a post by user C, I see they have a good reputation. If many people I ranked as high-value, also ranked user C as high-value, then I see user C as having a very high reputation. The same, in reverse, for low-value posters.</text></comment>