GigaOm news site published yesterday that Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay website, launched a crowdfunding project – in which supporters of an idea or cause are called to donate resources, in exchange for exclusive products and services – to create a message exchange application (in the Viber or WhatsApp style) in which the content is fully encrypted. Spyproof, is it?
That is the goal, because the idea is a practical response to the recent scandal of indiscriminate and illegal surveillance that the US government has been promoting for years on the servers of large internet companies and mobile telephony systems – in the USA and other countries, such as Brazil.
Sunde’s app – whose name, suggestive, is Hemlis (secret, Swedish) – will work on both iPhones and smartphones with Android system, but still has no release forecast. The system will be so secure that, as the nerd guarantees, only the company employees, if they wanted to, will be able to see the content of the messages.
But how can we help?
To collaborate with the development of Hemlis, you can donate from $5 to $500, with intermediate amounts of $10, 25 and 50 dollars. Each type of collaboration gives some “bindes”, such as pre-registering user names and even leaving the app credits.
By the time this post was written, the project had already collected $68,000 (from a goal of 100,000!). Which means you're almost there.
