We’re back! This year’s status letter covers all news-worthy updates since our previous letter. Inside This Year’s Letter: Missing Updates Group Income Beta Testing! development Group Income at BIG (Chicago) education Shelter Protocol Building Shelter research development DWebCamp 2023 (Camp Navarro) education Miscellaneous Decentralization Related Noteworthy Decentralization Tech research education How to tell if something is decentralized education Organizational New […]

As usual, this year’s status letter covers all news-worthy updates since our previous letter. Inside This Year’s Letter: Group Income 2018 Hawaii Hackathon development Group Income team continues to grow development Group Income Presentation at BlockCon 2018 (Los Angeles) education Miscellaneous Decentralization Related Rebooting Web-of-Trust (Toronto) research education Scaling Bitcoin (Tokyo) research Internet Identity Workshop […]

From the Better Late Than Never dept. comes our third yearly status letter. It covers all news-worthy updates since our previous letter. Inside This Year’s Letter: Blog Silence Group Income July 2017 hackathon development Anikó Fejes and Sandrina Pereira join Group Income! development BlockCon Basic Income Q&A With Scott Santens (Los Angeles) […]

This is our second yearly status letter. It covers all news-worthy updates since our previous letter. Inside This Year’s Letter: Group Income Voting systems research research education Victor Morrow Joins Group Income! development Group Income Shorts! education San Francisco Basic Income Create-A-Thon education development New York Meetup! education DPKI: Decentralized Public-key Infrastructure ID2020 - Rebooting […]

Previously, we reviewed Google’s Certificate Transparency efforts, and observed that while it does not prevent MITM attacks, it might detect at least some of them. We compared it to blockchains, and described what a Decentralized Public-key Infrastructure (DPKI), which uses blockchains, might look like. Today we compare […]

Listen up, super-villains and laboratory mice! Outlined in this post is a masterplan for how to “take over the world!” — by compromising Zcash.1 Potential Consequences The potential consequences of compromising Zcash’s trusted setup range from the fairly benign (someone buys themselves a private island) to the cartoonishly evil. […]

Also see our followup: How To Compromise Zcash And Take Over The World As part of our work, we will sometimes put a new system under scrutiny in order to provide constructive feedback, and/or clear up a widespread misunderstanding that could lead to problems down the road […]

Thanks to insightful feedback from John Light, I realized it would be good to do a regular Turtle Status Letter in order to keep our followers and supporters abreast of our activities and decision-making process. We now plan to do one every year. Inside This Year’s Letter: How […]

Some turtles got together this weekend to hack on a thon—err, for a Group Income hackathon! We're doing a hackathon this weekend (23-24th) on @Group_Income. If you want to work with us remotely, let us know!https://t.co/B22QjPW2pG— Group Income (@Group_Income) January 23, 2016 Group Income: A Currency-less Form Of […]

On Monday, the Internet received another reminder about its sad state of security. It was discovered that Dell decided to compromise their users’ Internet security in a way that’s difficult to top. As elaborated further in this post, Dell, in tandem with Google, made it possible for […]

Blockchains are difficult to run on most end-user devices. Although MITM-proof proxies are a great way to address this problem, they are unlikely to scale well to all Internet users (not everyone will be able to run their own full node). Therefore, most people will need to […]

After publishing our Certificate transparency on blockchains we learned of a recently updated IETF draft proposal that updates how Certificate Transparency (CT)1 gossip protocols work. The proposal now incorporates the technique of sharing SCTs and certificates between clients and servers that we discussed in our September post […]

This week Google learned of another batch of fraudulently issued certificates for several of their domains. At the end of the post they made a renewed call for Certificate Transparency. In this post, we’ll use the acronym CT to refer to Google’s implementation of the general […]

DNSChain 0.5 brings about many new features. It’s important to remember, however, that this project is not really about new bells and whistles. It’s about what kind of a world we want to live in, and for us the answer is clear: we want to live in […]

Update October 28, 2014: John Light, welcome aboard! Being a non-profit means we have a constant need to fund raise, so: The okTurtles Foundation is looking to hire a genius fundraiser, part time or full time. About okTurtles: The protocol “securing” most internet traffic today (SSL/TLS) has a 20+ year […]

Update: March 25, 2015, see also: Certificate transparency on blockchains Ben Laurie, project lead for Google’s Certificate Transparency (CT), recently published an article wherein he compared CT against various efforts to secure Internet communication world-wide from Man-In-The-Middle Attacks (MITM), including DNSChain. In it, he made several claims about […]

Oh boy! Lots of news to share about okTurtles and DNSChain in the upcoming days: These projects are now officially under the stewardship of a new non-profit organization called the okTurtles Foundation (more on this coming soon). We're going to be moving the site from okturtles.com ➜ okturtles.org We […]

We envision a future were owning and administering your own personal server is simple and commonplace. This vision naturally arises as more and more people begin to use and advocate distributed and decentralized technologies like Bitcoin and our very own DNSChain. Instead of learning to drive, […]

This post is about the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability that’s affecting the internet right now and not directly related to the okTurtles project. April 8, 2014 6PM EST: Looks like for this one the Debian team moved faster than their typical “minimum two-day migration” and got the fix […]

We’ve taken several important steps on the road to making “MITM-proof communication” on your favorite websites possible. We released the first version of DNSChain, the blockchain-based DNS resolver (fully compatible with canonical DNS). We launched the first public DNSChain server. Its 600 lines of […]