![]() ![]() Cyril Soler joined the project about two years ago, and has taken over the lead developer role.” ![]() That year Oguzhan Demirel joined the project and worked on the beginnings of the existing GUI, and has been continually improving it ever since. After about six months I realised that there was no possibility of creating a useful tool by myself, so I decided to open-source the project at the start of 2006. I’m sure many a good project started in a similar fashion. “Initially it was a distraction from writing up my Ph.D. The developers say the combination of PGP friend management and turtle file transfer makes RetroShare unique in the field of private F2F networks.įernie says he started working on RetroShare at the end of 2004. Fernie says, “Like any social network, the more friends you have on RetroShare, the better your experience will be, as RetroShare uses the peers to keep the network up.” Tunnels automatically reconfigure into paths with the shortest ping times when peers disconnect or when the network load changes. A turtle router component builds tunnels to anonymous distant peers, based on the hash of files. The GUI is based on Qt.įile transfer is based on anonymous turtle hopping. RetroShare services implemented on top of this include forums (which are like web forums, but private, and which support signed or anonymous messages), messages (chat, group chat, and private messages/mails), and lists of shared files. The core of the software is a library with an SSL communication layer over TCP and UDP, onto which is build a cache system and a packets exchange layer. After that, a list of friends of your friends appears, and you can decide how connect to them based on your friends’ signatures and trust level. The first time you connect to a friend using RetroShare you must exchange GPG certificates. Obviously that’s a huge aim, and we’re only part of the way at the moment.” Ideally we would become a hybrid of Facebook, Skype, and BitTorrent. “RetroShare aims to be a private F2F social network. “I am happy to share information with my friends, but I don’t want any company to have control over my profile, to be able to decide that my profile should be shared with ‘partners’ to aid their bank balance. Project founder Mark Fernie says, “I think the problems with centralised control have been illustrated time and time again, with the latest prominent example being Facebook’s changing privacy policy. RetroShare is completely decentralised, without any dependencies on central servers or companies. All communications are encrypted by 2,048-bit SSL keys. Friends sign their keys and indicate their trust level to maintain security in the network. RetroShare is a secure friend-to-friend (F2F) communication platform that uses PGP to implement a web of trust. When that information sharing involves computers, you can use RetroShare to exchange the information. If you know and trust me, you might share with me certain information that you wouldn’t want to be made public.
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