Win $25,000 in cash and prizes! Thomson Reuters is challenging developers in an international competition to create innovative mobile apps for financial professionals.
Judging: Will be performed by Thomson Reuters.
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Would you like to make a contribution of historical proportions? Here's your chance. This challenge is to create technology that can literally help to reshape our world, liberate hundreds of millions of people from repression, and bring down evil regimes in the process. There are few opportunities to create positive change on par with this one. Interested? Read on.
Recent brutal crackdowns in Tibet, Myanamar and Iran were successful because local governments were able to block, censor, and spy on Internet access by their citizens. This effectively cut off the free flow of information and made it impossible for people on the ground to report the atrocities they witnessed safely. There is no threat to Democracy like cutting off the free flow of information. The free flow of information is the lifeblood of Democracy. Currently the power to control information rests in the hands of the few. This must be changed or Democracy (worldwide, not just in developing countries or tyrranical regimes) will become a thing of the past within 50 years. The stakes are very high.
Armed governments, run by tyrants, are a great threat not only to Democracy, but to the survival of our species and to the well-being of hundreds of millions, and even billions, of people on this planet. While we cannot arm every citizen with a gun, we can arm them with anonymous, unblockable mobile Internet access. They already have camera phones.
This one technological contribution could shift the balance of power back to the people. The power of the camera phone connected by a safe and unblockable connection to the Internet trumps the power of the gun.
This challenge is to develop or port a technology that gives people unblockable, encrypted, anonymous Internet access for widely used mobile devices (devices that are prevalent in developing countries, or even countries such as China, where such crackdowns typically occur).
One promising direction is the TOR platform. If such a system could be ported to popular mobile devices it could make a real difference in the world. For more on this see:
Prize will be awarded to the first fully working, consumer-ready (ready for consumers to download and use) app that meets the goals of this challenge.
Additional awards, judges and criteria may be added to this prize as time goes on.
Must work on mobile devices that are widely used in Asia (China in particular, but also Myanamar) and the Middle East (Iran for example). These are regions where State-sponsored Internet blocking is rampant.
Must be possible to download and install by a non-technical device owner using a simple one-click install, with an optional settings step and optional advanced settings.
A particular desired, but not required, feature of this solution is that it should be possible to hide and/or quickly delete all signs of this application in an emergency. If a person is arrested and their mobile device is confiscated, any evidence of such a connection should be hidden or deleted easily. The best solution for this would be a dead-man's switch such that if the application is not given permission regularly (using some kind of key code perhaps) then it removes itself from the device. This would have to happen without the process of confirmation and removal being visible to a third-party operating the device. The goal of this feature is to protect the device owner if they are in custody or their device is confiscated. In an ideal world the application could reset the device, deleting everything, if it does not receive confirmation repeatedly (after a few missed confirmation deadlines). The dead man's switch should be optional and set on or off with a configuration step.
Ideally the winning solution will work on an optimal mobile device platform for the desired region(s) (Asia and the Middle East). Ideally it will be open source and freely available as well, to maximize the spread and adoption of the technology. These are not required features of the winning solution, but are desired and will count towards a final decision.
Software-only solution is a requirement. Should not require new or special add-on hardware. Must work with standard Internet-enabled phones that consumers already have today.
Solution must work on at least one of the top 3 most widely used (by number of people in the installed base) mobile phones and networks in the target regions (Asia and the Middle East: particularly China, Iran, Myanamar).
PLEDGES
ChallengePost does not guarantee pledges will be collectable. Successful solvers who identify pre-existing solutions will not receive cash, but their profiles will reflect their success and how many people they helped.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Will remain with whoever successfully solves the challenge.
Let me flag this as a "solution in progress" and not quite solved yet. I am excited to the see this challenge posted and am looking forwarding to seeing what others have come up with.
I am the lead on an open-source effort known as the Guardian Project, which is well on the way to implementing this based on the Android platform. Android is not quite there yet in terms of global availability, but we believe that will change in the next year due to the prolieration of low-end Android models being developed and sold by China Mobile and T-Mobile around the world.
Our goal is an anonymous, encrypted, secure handset for browsing, texting, IM and voice, with our intended base of users being humanitarian workers, human rights advocates, journalists and activists. You can view our presentation here: http://openideals.com/guardian
Our first release was a port of the native Tor code to Android with a Java-based Android app on top of it named "Orbot". This effort was done in concert with the Tor Project themselves as well as the University of Cambridge: Readm more here: http://openideals.com/2009/10/22/orbot-proxy/
We are also on our way to providing encrypted SMS (via http://www.cryptosms.org/ ), a Jabber/IM off the record app, and encrypted voice via http://SipDroid.org with VPN and Zfone support.
All code wil be released as open-source under the appropriate licenses.
URL Provided by Solver: http://openideals.com/guardian
We've a functional solution to this challenge - though it requires a bit of fine-tuning to implement fully per the spec. However, before getting into details it's necessary to clarify a subtle but important misconception inherent in the structure of the challenge as written.
To accomplish these goals, it's necessary to have more than just a piece of software; more specifically, the software substrate is necessary but not sufficient for a successful implementation. The full implementation requires network service, in addition to the software layer.
Tor is a great example of this objective reality. While Tor has some neat software, and lots of coders really proud of the software they have written for Tor (often, paid for by donations from citizens), it's a complete failure as an on-the-ground implementation. Because it simply "assumes" that some group of entities will donate massive quantities of network bandwidth on an ongoing basis, the Tor project is chronically, permanently, and intrinsically unable to support the demand of its users. That means it comes up with all sorts of rules to try to get people NOT to use the network - exactly the opposite of the plain-language goal of such tools. For 99% of non-geek network users, the hassle of scrambling for Tor nodes that aren't totally overwhelmed with traffic is far more than they'll ever attempt. That is why Tor is a neat proof-of-concept, but completely unsuccessful as a scalable solution for real human beings.
To provide that service to people, and not only allow but actually encourage them to use it for ALL of their communications online, all the time, it is necessary to provision real bandwidth. Nowadays, bandwidth isn't terribly expensive - but it's not quite free. Plus, someone must actually run that network and the bandwidth underlying the secure service - not just in their "spare time" when not flying around to conferences and other fun events but actual sysadmin work. A volunteer, donation-only model like Tor simply isn't structurally appropriate for that sort of ongoing service delivery.
Our privacy network provides exactly what nonprofit secure networking models lack, and we've been delivering privacy service online for almost 3 years already. We don't limit what our customer can do, the bandwidth they use, or the applications they are "allowed" to run. We simply wrap ALL network traffic in a secure network layer and tunnel it out of insecure jurisdictions and into a cloud of secure gateway servers.
To fully deploy our model on mobile "smartphones," we've a bit of tuning to do in optimizing our client software to run on GSM network topologies. We've actually tested those tweaks already, in-house, and it's not terribly complex to do it in a production environment. To scale the model to millions of private network participants requires not much additional coding, but the ability to subsidize the cost of network provisioning as the overall customer traffic scales.
Fausty | CTO, Baneki Privacy Computing
URL Provided by Solver: http://www.cryptocloud.net
"If we allow the governments to hide the internet then how do we support those in crisis? Twitter and WWW help us police the bad that is placed on humanity."
""Political rights, including freedom of expression and discussion, are not only pivotal in inducing social responses to economic needs, they are also central to the conceptualization of economic needs themselves." - Amartya Sen"
"we are a group of international students at NASA trying to get EXACTLY this going independently...and to connect a "Google Earth" or "World Wind" like interface to provide Social Networking with a Geographical interface for all to see from wherever the message is coming from!"