Awards August 2008

The winners of the August 2008 call are:

• Anomos

  Anomos is a pseudonymous, encrypted multi-peer-to-peer file distribution protocol. It is based on the peer/tracker concept of BitTorrent in combination with the onion routing anonymization layer concept of Tor, with the added benefit of end-to-end encryption. By combining these concepts, a platform is being created whereby no party outside of the trusted tracker will have any information about who a peer is or what they are downloading. BitTorrent is a popular P2P protocol, but it isn't secure and its users are still actively being pursued and prosecuted. Tor is a popular anonymity tool, but it isn't end to end encrypted, which is dangerous. It is also slow and users are instructed to refrain from using file sharing. Anomos shall overcome these restrictions.

  General Features of Anomos:

  • File transfers through Anomos are anonymous. After being sent, packets are routed through a number of intermediary nodes before reaching their final destination. These intermediary nodes can only confirm that their neighbours are participating in the network, they cannot confirm that their neighbours are sharing or merely relaying information, nor can they determine what is being shared.
  • Downloading with Anomos is decentralized --the downloader receives parts of the requested file from a number of different sources, similar to how BitTorrent functions.
  • Connections within Anomos are End-To-End encrypted.
  • Communication with the Tracker is also encrypted.
• DIFR Tag-Scan-Privacy-Match

  Goal of the project is to develop a demonstrator of a different way to inform consumers about the RFID tags on the items they buy or the tags that surround them in their environment. Main idea is to use a mobile phone to display information about RFID tags in the vicinity. In particular, the setup of the demonstrator operates as follows: A consumer sets his privacy preferences in a profile stored on his mobile phone. If he holds the phone close to a product in a shop containing an RFID tag, the phone will read the tag number from the tag. It will then query (over the Internet, either through GPRS, UMTS or WiFi) the backoffice to retrieve the privacy policy corresponding to the tag number. It will then match the tag policy with the consumer policy, and present the result of the match to the consumer on the display of the mobile phone in an intuitive and appealing manner.

  This demonstrator will be used to show how such a concept empowers users in deciding for themselves how their privacy is affected and how to respond to that information, and allows producers to efficiently communicate their privacy policy to consumers.

  The demonstrator will be shown to the public at a special DIFRenz workshop currently being planned at the Balie, Amsterdam, scheduled for October 31, 2008.

• Multi-party Instant Message server for SIP based on MSRP

  This is a prolongation of the financing of the successfully running project aiming to implement an open source MSRP multi-party instant message chat server that works seamless with the MSRP relay implementation, already under development.

• Proxima 2.0

  In line with the Web 2.0 trend, an increasing number of web sites offer visitors the possibility to modify and add content. However, the editors provided are either basic text editors that are awkward for editing complex presentations, or custom-made editors for a specific type of content: Examples are Wiki's, the Yahoo! Pipes editor, and Google Docs suite.

  Proxima 2.0 will build a server-based generic editor which can be used to create powerful editors with little effort. It will allow an easy creation of WYSIWYG editors on web-pages, without requiring editing user to install any software. Instead, a browser runs a simple script that draws a rendering of the edited content and sends edit events back to the server. The Proxima generic editor system has a layered architecture that can be modified in a straightforward way to support a client-server model.

  The project will realize the web-based client-server version of existing Proxima. Furthermore, a number of interesting editors will be instantiated to showcase the capabilities of the system, thus helping to attract the attention of possible contributors to the project.

• Small Sister

  This is a privacy project that aims to fight the dangers of data retention. A simple architecture based on existing technologies (PGP, TOR, Freenet) will take a chat-message or e-mail to another user and then place it online waiting for the recipient. It shall become obscure to discover who communicated (anonymity), but it is *not* obscure to the recipient (accountability), if the sender wants so. The application will be complimented with many user friendly features to make this an easy to use system. SmallSister tries to be user friendly and aims to reach a larger crowd, since that increases the level of privacy and anonymity. The tool itself will be useful for end-users as a contact list that integrates seamless into other applications using plugins. By doing that you don't have to change the way people work.

Conferences, hackathons, donations

• Morphle

  The Morphle project is about putting an alpha release of a meta-website online. The website offers free and anonymous powerful but simple to use end-user website editing based on state of the art component ecapsulation technologies in the hands of everyone. The project offers advanced open source Squeak based web technologies in the hands of end-users while preserving anonymity, more advanced than Drupal, Cmsbox, Yahoo Pipes or Google widgets and many others.
  NLnet funding will be used to pay webserver rental and bandwidth to construct scalable service.