Decentralized Internet and Privacy

Closing of the Decentralized Internet devroom

UD2.218A
Kevin Schulmeister
<p>Recap of the main topics and news about what's next with the decentral.community</p>

Additional information

Live Stream https://live.fosdem.org/watch/ud2218a
Type devroom
Language English

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2/1/26
Decentralized Internet and Privacy
Kevin Schulmeister
UD2.218A
<p>The Internet landscape is evermore on it’s steadfast course towards surveillance and centralization. Video content and streaming out of CDNs now account for half of all global traffic; splinternets are now a thing, from China to South Korea, from Russia to Iran; mandatory backdoors on communication platforms are just around the conner with EU’s Chat Control. In this scenario, where most Internet connected devices have become tools of imprisonment rather than liberation, reviving the old ...
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Mosh Lee
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<p>Can we make the web more decentralized and more private without asking users to switch browsers? For the past five years, the IPFS ecosystem has pioneered multiple approaches to this challenge. This talk shares hard-won lessons about what works—and what doesn't.</p> <p>We'll cover three parallel strategies: (1) pushing for native protocol support in major browsers, (2) driving adoption of critical cryptographic building blocks (such as Ed25519 into WebCrypto API, a three-year standards ...
2/1/26
Decentralized Internet and Privacy
David Thompson
UD2.218A
<p>The massive size of browser engines has concentrated power over the web platform into a few large corporations. Creating a new browser engine that is sufficiently featureful to be an alternative to the Big Three is practically impossible. But what if we could shrink the footprint of a browser's core? What if a browser was little more than a WebAssembly (Wasm) runtime and nearly everything else was an extension? By breaking up the monolith we would have a chance to re-decentralize control over ...
2/1/26
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Jah Kosha
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<p>In recent decades, the internet has increasingly become centralized, shifting from its hacker-driven origins into a cartel of advertising companies. It won't get better if we allow these same companies to drive the design of the web browsers and their protocols.</p> <p>Within hacker communities, many solutions have been developed to mitigate centralization, but their adoption has been limited, often because they require specialized expertise to be operated safely.</p> <p>In this talk I'll ...
2/1/26
Decentralized Internet and Privacy
Özcan Oğuz
UD2.218A
<p>For over a decade, critiques of OpenPGP and GnuPG have resurfaced in cycles: too complex, too fragile, too old, unfriendly, too “cryptonerd.” Modern messaging apps, "forward-secrecy-by-default" protocols, and crypto tools are frequently presented as decisive reasons to abandon GPG altogether. Yet these arguments often rely on a deeper and more troubling assumption: that ordinary users cannot and should not be expected to understand or control their own cryptographic identity.</p> <p>This ...
2/1/26
Decentralized Internet and Privacy
UD2.218A
<p>Nym is the first decentralized noise-generating mixnet to provision real-world network anonymity to Internet users even against nation-state adversaries. The aim here is to supersede existing VPNs in order to fight increasingly more powerful authoritarianism and surveillance. Unlike traditional centralized VPNs that can be de-anonymized by a global passive adversary - like the NSA - based on their traffic patterns, Nym adds noise (“cover traffic”) to existing Internet communications. ...
2/1/26
Decentralized Internet and Privacy
Hendrik
UD2.218A
<p>TLS has secured the internet for decades, but it has a major limitation: because TLS relies on symmetric encryption, data cannot simply be shared with a third party. As a result, most Web data remains locked inside centralized silos. HTTPS provides authenticity and confidentiality, but not verifiable provenance, leaving applications to rely on screenshots, scraped HTML, or centralized access control mechanisms such as OAuth.</p> <p>zkTLS changes this. Using MPC-TLS and zero-knowledge ...