Cult of the Dead Cow is a hacker collective whose members at one time included Texas politician Beto O’Rourke. Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won’t keep hold of users’ personal data.

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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    SAN FRANCISCO — Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won’t keep hold of users’ personal data.

    The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments.

    The team behind Veilid has not yet released documentation explaining its design choices, and collaborative work on an initial messaging app, intended to function without requiring a phone number, has yet to produce a test version.

    The FBI did not respond to a request for comment, but law enforcement agencies often complain that end-to-end encryption makes it hard to scan messages for criminal plots and for police to recover evidence after the fact.

    That pair includes Peiter Zatko, widely known as Mudge, who was a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the head of security for the online payments facilitator Stripe.

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