How to Convert a Wordpress blog to an Astro Static Site

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to migrate a blog off of Wordpress and onto a static site generator while preserving your blog’s content, links, and even comments. There are many static site generators out there. The one we’ll be using is called Astro. Note: this tutorial […]

The Ultimate iOS to GrapheneOS Migration Guide and Review

For years Silicon Valley looked to Apple. Apple was the leader of the industry. The visionary. The one who brought personal computing to us all. There was a genuine excitement in the air. Every time Steve got up on that stage, it was like Christmas. A magical […]

Turtles Status Letter #5 — Years In Review

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 […]

Turtles Status Letter #4 — Year In Review

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 […]

Turtles Status Letter #3 — Year In Review

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) […]

Turtle Status Letter #2 — Group Income + DPKI + More!

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 […]

CONIKS vs Key Transparency vs Certificate Transparency vs Blockchains

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 […]

How To Compromise Zcash And Take Over The World

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. […]

The Zcash Catch

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 […]

Our First Status Letter: Browser Extension, DNSChain, DPKI, & More!

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 […]

Of Turtles And Group Income Hackathons

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 (@groupincome@crib.social) (@Group_Income) January 23, 2016 Group Income: A Currency-less Form […]

Proof of Transition: New Thin Client Technique for Blockchains

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 […]

Certificate Transparency's improved gossip protocols show promise

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 […]

Certificate transparency on blockchains

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 Released: HTTPS + Openname Resolver API + More!

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 […]

[Job] Fundraising Genius (Update: Filled!)

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 […]

The Trouble with Certificate Transparency

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 […]

okTurtles Demo at SOUPS 2014 (EFF CUP Crypto Usability Prize)

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 […]

How to downgrade a linux kernel on Debian

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, […]

How to update OpenSSL on Debian testing (Jessie) for #Heartbleed

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 […]

Introducing the dotDNS metaTLD

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 […]