10 FUTURESCOT
COVER STORY
28 April 2016
The future of the internet
might lie in a hut in Troon
with a software company
whose boss is a part-time
lifeboat helmsman
Stranger things have
happened but could
MaidSafe’s plan for an
alternative internet
actually float – or sink
without trace?
BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN
Two years ago a little-known software
company from Troon rather unexpectedly announced that it had raised $6m
in the space of five hours by crowdselling access to a new product they
had not even yet created.
Through its own community forum,
a developer mailing list and Google
Hangouts, the firm in question,
MaidSafe, had managed to excite
enough people to invest in what was –
and still is as I write – an idea. If it was
a pitching effort on Dragon’s Den, you
might expect to be told ‘you don’t have
a business’, but that hasn’t stopped a
dedicated team of developers run by
a part-time lifeboat helmsman in a
seaside town otherwise known for its
golf course and its ice creams.
But for those who have supported
MaidSafe over the last 10 years –
friends, families and a grassroots online community (company COO Nick
Lambert jokes that they are “one of the
world’s oldest startups”) it is because of
a deeply-held belief in their cause. That
cause, not to put too fine a point on it,
is to create a new internet.
As jaw-dropping as that sounds - it’s
“bonkers” according to one of their
advisers, Michael Jackson, the former
COO of Skype, who has taken an active
interest in the tiny firm which operates
out of a ramshackle hut-like office –
the idea is grounded in some pretty
sound principles, as I am increasingly
persuaded during conversations with
both Lambert and Jackson.
To grasp why MaidSafe could
potentially have a huge impact on the
digital world, it helps to look back at
the history of the internet, which was
originally designed to be a means of
communicating information across a
decentralised network.
THIS IDEA came about in the mid-
1960s and the first workable internet
was ARPANET – a US Department
of Defense research project. It has
been claimed that the intention of this
project was to create a pool of critical
government and military information
spread across a network that could survive a nuclear attack, although those
design goals are still debated.
Nevertheless, Lambert’s argument
is that the internet has paradoxically
evolved to become very centralised,
with vast corporations holding much
of our private information in remotely
located data centres located around
the world.
We trade much of our information
– sometimes reticently, sometimes willingly – for access to many of the ‘free’
web services we enjoy: Facebook and
Google to name perhaps the two most
powerful. There is a tacit understanding – tied up in many, many pages of
‘privacy’ agreements that we accede
to – that our information may be sold
on to advertisers, hence why we don’t
actually pay for any of these services.
It is that trade-off, a necessary one
for the current free models to work,
that has partly inspired MaidSafe –
through the idea of its founder David
Irvine – to establish an alternative internet, where the network is returned
back to its original decentralised state,
and where we can all exercise our
fundamental human rights of privacy,
security and freedom.
That is all very well, and more than a
bit theoretical, but who can claim these
days that they feel safe when browsing
online that the many usernames and
passwords they enter into websites
to access their banks, social media
accounts and emails are immune from
“The SAFE network
is a crowdsourced
internet, replacing
data centres and
servers with users’
spare computing
resources”
Nick Lambert, COO, MaidSafe
loss or theft by increasingly sophisticated hacking attempts?
You only have to think of the attacks
on Sony and Talk Talk to realise that
our data can be very vulnerable. And
it’s not just a feeling.
According to the Breach Level
Index – a survey by the world-leading
digital security firm Gemalto – more
than 3.6 billion data records have
been exposed worldwide since 2013
when the index began benchmarking
publicly-disclosed data breaches.
The report found that in 2015,
‘malicious outsiders’ were the leading
source of these breaches, accounting
for 964, or 58%, of breaches and 38%
of compromised records, while identity
theft remained the primary type of
breach, accounting for 53% of data
breaches and 40% of all compromised
records.
These breaches increasingly leave
people with the unnerving sense
that they might be next, a sentiment
echoed in last year’s Eurobarometer –
an EU-wide survey of 28,000 people
on the subject of data protection. The
central finding of the survey shows that
trust in digital environments remained
David Irvine, MaidSafe chief
executive and founder, left,
with company chief operating
officer Nick Lambert
low. Two-thirds of respondents said
that they were worried about having
no control over the information they
provided online, while only 15% felt
they had complete control.
SO, IF AN alternative way of data storage and communications could be created, it would it would surely command
a great deal of popular support.
And this is where companies like
MaidSafe could potentially come in,
with its SAFE (Secure Access for Everyone) network. Originally using the
software language C++ (this has now
been supplanted by Rust, a simpler,
more efficient code) the company is
about to launch its MVP (Minimum
Viable Product) to the world, where it
will hopefully demonstrate that SAFE
not only works, but is much better than
what we currently have.
“The SAFE network is a crowdsourced internet replacing data centres
and servers with users’ spare computing resources,” explains Lambert.
“What we are creating here is an infrastructure and what we will be trying to
do is engage with application developers like Dropbox, like social networks,
who can then build applications on top
of the network knowing that all the
privacy and security considerations are
taken care of.”
ALTHOUGH THE concept is difficult
to grasp – for me at least – the basic
theory behind it is that the network is
the users themselves. So rather than
uploading our files to data centres and
servers that are prone to theft (and
surveillance, as the Edward Snowden
revelations demonstrated), when we
join SAFE we become part of a direct
peer-to-peer data storage and communications network. There is no need
for a middle man. This is revolutionary
stuff, if it works.
There is also no fee for joining but
a payment in kind: users donate their
computing power and spare resources
(the unused part of our hard drives)
and in return they earn a cryptocurrency called Safecoin, which can be
exchanged for access to services; those
app developers are in turn rewarded in
Safecoins which are earned according
to the number of people using their
applications; they can also be traded in
for hard cash.
If MaidSafe becam e the alternative internet of tomorrow, Facebook’s
business model might well collapse
if it lost the advertising revenue from
people’s data it potentially wouldn’t be
able to see.
But it would have a new revenue
stream through the amount of Safecoins it was able to earn, creating a
subscription model instead. Lambert
believes companies might choose
to hedge their bets by offering their
applications on the old internet and
MaidSafe’s new one; but what it does
do is offer a competitive advantage to
services which might struggle to break
into the top tier of its market.
IN CLOUD storage terms, Lambert
says, that would help the 40 or so
providers who sit beneath the likes of
Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft
OneDrive. The really clever part, in
security terms, is that any data we may
eventually store in the SAFE network
is encrypted, broken into chunks and