Wire: Communication for the 21st century activist
https://github.com/radiosilence/wire (MIT Licensed)
Because Facebook, SMS, E-mail, Twitter etc are all utterly compromised and untrustworthy for political purposes, I thought that people needed a new system to post events, register activity, message each other (with optional encryption).
There are options out there but honestly I think uptake is low because the majority of activists are not hugely technically competent and whilst I2P, PGP et all are fantastic in their own right, they aren't really feasible for the average political protester.
So the idea is to build a system that is simple to use, anonymous (IE no IPs logged), and provides some neat features that would otherwise be unavailable to the average activist (such as encryption, self-destructing messages, destruct keys, etc).
The entire site will be hosted using SSL on my server, but there will be instructions for easy deployment to other servers should people wish to set up their own installations (for security, trust, which is understandable).
Currently the UI is fairly minimal and modelled to be familiar to people who've used Facebook for events and messaging. Conversation is done in the form of flat threads (currently) between as many people as desired (people can be added to conversations).
It's built on Redis and Python/Flask. Encryption is done using AES-256 and a custom PBKDF algorithm based on stretched Whirlpool, so it's exceptionally secure.
Without HTTPS enabled (to actually benchmark the script), it can perform about 1000 requests per second on my tiny server, but obviously it can scale, because of the back-end technology used.
Currently got a landing page set up at:
https://wire-bbs.org
But if anyone's interested in the code or contributing, check out the GitHub repository.
Screenshots:
https://wire-bbs.org/event_screen.png
https://wire-bbs.org/thread.png
https://wire-bbs.org/inbox.png
https://wire-bbs.org/create_event.png
Most of the feedback I've been getting is on the design, though what would be nice is the more experienced technical people advising me on some logistics and reviewing whether my security is sufficient (methods of encryption, key differentiation, etc).
Another idea I had was to be able to store messages purely in memcached, so if the server was shut off/restarted, any messages in memory would be lost. However, a friend said that memcached stuff would still be paged, which means being written to HDD - this is bad, obviously.
How else could I get some traction for this project? I'm going to (obviously) promote it within the activist communities I'm a part of, but other than that, how does an OSS project get popular?