Anonymous Creates Its Own Social Network 271
An anonymous reader writes "Google has reportedly banned a handful of Anonymous members from Google+ (it's not exactly clear how many accounts were shut down). The hacktivist group likened Google's actions to the stories of activists being banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, as well as governments blocking various websites using Internet censorship tools. As a result, Anonymous has decided to create its own social network: Anonplus."
Re:Oxymoron (Score:5, Informative)
Public key cryptography, of course. To 'friend' someone, you generate a keypair and give them the public key and your user id. They do the same. Wall posts, comments, etc., are encrypted with a symmetric cipher (with a random single-use key), and the symmetric key is encrypted with the public key of each person who you want to make the message available to. Of course, you are vulnerable to an evil friend publishing your posts, but that is an unsolvable problem (see: DRM). In place of stateful authentication, each post is signed with a private key whose counterpart is held by the server.
Do all the crypto client-side (perhaps javascript, or alternate integrated clients, like gwibber and smartphone facebook apps) and all the server has to do is hold the encrypted content and validate signatures. You could even make a generalized protocol out of it, so that the content doesn't have to be on any particular server, i.e. host your own damn social network profile. That would ease the node-to-node bandwidth requirements of a server farm for the service. If you're familiar with it, think Sone on Freenet, but without the distributed hash table and associated latency.