The Need for Inkrypt
An anonymized, censorship-resistant content hosting platform
Governments and Centralization
Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the modern age is that the very mechanism by which the global system of interconnected computer networks — referred to by the umbrella term the internet — became such a revolutionary and influential force in terms of social, cultural, and economic impact, is now the primary characteristic that allows governments to curb its liberating effects in an increasing efficient manner and route information in a self-serving way. Centralization allowed for a new set of techniques that could be built onto the pre-existing Web 1.0, a set of static and proprietary websites and applications that lacked user interaction, and turn it into an interactive network known as the Web 2.0. Highly renowned platforms like Facebook and Amazon are examples of fruits borne from such cultivation as they sported large centralized data servers that could support the input of millions of users around the world in an efficient and integrated fashion, spurring an exchange of ideas, norms, and information on a scale that had been unprecedented in human history.
As time ventured further into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, it was also becoming increasingly obvious that governments around the world were co-opting this centralized internet infrastructure to safeguard the political status quo and stifle dissent. We can observe examples of this phenomenon even as early as 1998, when the Russian Federal Security Service issued a decree requiring Internet Service Providers to install surveillance technology that would grant access to the communications of internet users at the agency’s discretion. Practices stemming from this vein of Orwellian thought would go on to be legally codified by regimes around the world as governments began to adapt the internet’s architecture for political motives. In 2001, Burma began allowing the limited usage of internet and email, but all traffic was routed through the eyes of watchful government servers and access was confined to a curated array of web sites. As part of the series of legislations and technologies implemented by the PRC, known as the Great Firewall of China, the Golden Shield Project was launched in 2003, which established a large domestic surveillance and censoring system regulating the internet activities of Chinese citizens. A vast array of literature cites that these developments have only been getting worse in recent years, evidenced by Columbia Journalism Review findings that governments are becoming more efficient at conducting censorship using the current internet architecture and a 2016 Freedom House report lamenting that two-thirds of the world’s population now lives under regimes of internet censorship.
Governments also engaged in acute practices targeting particular actors that mocked or criticized their regimes. In 2005, Kazakhstan seized every .kz domain and terminated one of those domains owned by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen ahead of the release of his 2006 movie, Borat, a very crude yet searing satire of popularly held phobias and convictions born of ignorance. In 2007, the Pakistani dictator, Pervez Musharraf, ordered the shutdown of two of the nation’s largest media outlets, GEO and ARY, which had been the most outspoken journalism firms against his martial law amidst mounting public protests. Being forced to shut down their central servers, all transmissions were effectively terminated. And more recently, due to the onset of and blowback from the Arab Spring this decade, there has been a marked increase in the level of internet journalism censorship in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and others: a trend that is predicted to continue as resulting proxy wars rage on and political instability remains the new norm.
Complicity of Centralized Entities
It should come as no surprise that, by and large, when faced with the decision of choosing between profitability and ideological commitment to liberty in the context of when the two of substantially mutually exclusive, companies will opt for the former and compromise on the latter, acting in accordance with profit-maximizing microeconomic theory. We have witnessed this line of decision-making in several instances. For example, the hardware which enabled the censoring framework in the Golden Shield Project was provided chiefly by US-based IT companies, including the well-known technology conglomerate Cisco Systems, Inc.
Especially detrimental for data privacy and content hosting security has been the complicity of companies in the existing cloud-hosting infrastructure. In an act of appeasement in 2009, Google blocked Iranian users from accessing its cloud service Google AppEngine, a solution that would have allowed the circumventing of imposed censorship during mass protests against alleged rigging in the 2009 Iranian Presidential Elections. More recently in 2017, Amazon Web Services’ Chinese arm succumbed to government pressure by issuing guidance to stop the usage of its VPNs and other circumventing products, stating that failure to comply would result in the shutdown of websites using these services. Similarly, earlier that year, Apple acquiesced to Chinese governmental demands and deleted over 60 VPN apps from its AppsStore in China which citizens had been using to tunnel around the Great Firewall. Adding further fuel to the fire, Apple also opted this year to migrate iCloud accounts registered in mainland China to state-run Chinese servers. Thus, it is abundantly clear that the cost of centralized companies doing business in jurisdictions like China continues to be paid at the expense of data security and privacy as these entities make the compromises they deem to be necessary to safeguard their corporate interests.
Advent of Decentralized Platforms
Once more is the internet on the cusp of large-scale reform as advances in cryptography and peer-to-peer protocols, notable of which being the development of distributed ledgers technologies such as blockchain, prod the existing Web 2.0 towards a decentralized infrastructure, largely undoing the monopolizing effects of corporate giants such as Google and Amazon and devolving these large private networks and deep concentrations of power that become prime targets for governmental coercion. In a sense, these nascent yet rapidly growing developments on the world wide web that are collectively being known as the Web 3.0 are interestingly reminiscent of the privacy-centric and decentralized vision of the Web 1.0. Many are in agreement that this on-going phase of internet evolution will catapult the level of data security to new heights as the issues of single-to-few point(s) of failure are eliminated through trustless platforms like Ethereum and EOS.
Much work has been done specifically in the realm of content hosting with decentralized ventures such Filecoin and Sia which provide storage and relay networks comprised of nodes: individuals around the world who rent out the excess storage space of their device hard drives on which fragmented and replicated content is stored and distributed in return for tokenized compensation. Particularly revolutionary is the open-source InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol developed by Protocol Labs on which the Filecoin overlay is based, as it allows for content-based addressing as opposed to the location-based addressing that HTTP provides. Under the current HTTP regime that dominates Web 2.0, if one were to access a picture on Facebook they had seen on a friend’s device, their own device would have to send a request to the central Facebook server located in California and call the data from there to render the image on their device. In the IPFS paradigm, however, the data request would be for the content itself as opposed to the location of the server. The request would find the file hash of the content on the friend’s device and both render and cache it on one’s own device. This protocol severely limits the exposure of data to IP address and DDOS attacks as request distances are progressively shortened. Furthermore, because the data is also then cached on the requester’s device, redundancy increases over greater geographies, which means there is a constant assurance against single or few points of failure on the network.
As one can see, Protocol Labs’ creation of IPFS is a truly remarkable value-add to the world wide web and a significant galvanizing force behind the formation of a vast array of decentralized applications. That being said, IPFS remains an underlying protocol and not a venture-ready solution. Protocol Labs has kept IPFS open-source and continues to encourage entities to build on top of it and fashion it in ways that overcome the points of friction that arise when plying the technology for enterprise or other tailored uses, which is what projects such as Filecoin and Po.et have done in varying ways in accordance with their own use-cases.
Role of Inkrypt
In a nutshell, Inkrypt seeks to build over the IPFS protocol and tailor it into an enterprise-ready solution for the journalism industry. As touched upon previously, journalism is one of the most severely affected spaces by governmental internet censorship as the very role of a journalist — reporting the truth of ground realities — is highly detrimental to abusive and authoritative regimes which would benefit from operating in a shroud of falsely positive misinformation. By providing an IPFS-based distributed nodal network for content storage and distribution, the Inkrypt protocol will endow journalism with both front-end and back-end censorship resistance while creating a marketplace for storage as renters are compensated with native tokens. And because the network is entirely distributed, there is no concentration of network power that can be strong armed by external entities to do their bidding.
The motivation behind the format and value proposition of this venture can be traced back to a real-world proof-of-concept established by the 2017 Catalan Independence Referendum. While the Spanish government had deemed the referendum taking place in the autonomous region of Catalonia to be illegal, the vote proceeded nonetheless. Despite efforts by the Spanish government to censor pro-referendum journalism sites from publishing the results, a group of tech-savvy Catalonians created mirror sites using the IPFS protocol to successfully broadcast the results.
This is exactly the sort of social value Inkrypt seeks to generate on a larger-scale by providing an enterprise-ready solution for journalism outlets that removes the technological and logistical points of friction for mass adoption by the industry. This entails providing publishers with content management services, by integrating current solutions such as WordPress, as well as micropayments solution which would enable token-holders to access paywalled journalism content, both of which would be seamlessly integrated into the back-end distributed nodal infrastructure. Furthermore, Inkrypt intends to provide a liquidity reserve of native tokens on behalf of media outlets to ensure smooth network transactions even during times of illiquidity on secondary markets. This will also act as a buffer for outlets against price volatility. The back-end will also differ from other decentralized storage solutions through Amazon-like CDN-esque “Cache Hit, Cache Miss” mechanics and a complementary garbage disposal (Cache Clearing) algorithm ensuring optimized delivery and minimized congestion so that the geographic concentration of the redundancy of content is proportional to the frequency by which it is accessed throughout the various parts of the globe. This is extremely crucial as it provides automatic up-scaling and downscaling of redundancy so that the publishers will not have to predict for the level of desired redundancy for their content beforehand, which is what they would have to do with other existing decentralized solutions. Instead, they would rely on the network to optimize the level of replication in accordance to how frequently the content is accessed by viewers around the world. This ensures publishers only pay for replications caused by viewer access as opposed to paying for an arbitrary preset number of replications that may be too few or too many for the actual demand of the content.
The Inkrypt team is based out of the Harvard Innovation Labs in Boston, and while Inkrypt is still an early-stage venture, it has gained significant traction fairly quickly. It has advanced as Semi-Finalists in both the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ i3 Innovation Challenge, and has been accepted into Underscore VC’s _U First Incubation Program. The team is currently in talks with the Innovation Office of CNN as well as several South Asian media outlets as it works on the development of a testnet which it intends to deploy on Syrian journalists ahead of the impending Inkrypt token sale later this year.
Visit the venture’s website to learn more about the team and ways of getting in touch. Follow Inkrypt on Twitter to stay up to date on the latest developments and activities and subscribe to Inkrypt’s Telegram to share your thoughts and ideas with the community. In the meantime, stay tuned for further posts which will delve deeper into the system architecture, upcoming strategic partnerships, governance mechanics, crypto-economics, and other aspects of the venture which will be instrumental in realizing the vision of a censorship-resistant and effective Web 3.0 enterprise solution for the noble industry of journalism.
