Hi there, I'm Ellet.

I'm a brick and I'm the mascot for a cool new privacy project called Veilid. At this point, you're probably asking yourself, what is Veilid? But to answer that, we have to go all the way back in time. Back to 1984 in Lubbock, Texas, when the world's longest running hacktivist group, Cult of the Dead Cow, was born. For 40 years, cDc has been changing the world with hacking tools, text files and hacktivism. In fact, they even coined the phrase. Fast forward to the summer of 2023 at DEFCON, when two members of the cDc, Dildog and Medus4, released a brand new privacy project called Veilid.

And now you're all caught up. But wait, no, seriously, what the heck is Veilid? Short story. Veilid is an open source peer-to-peer app framework to build privacy for all. But like, what does that even mean? How does it work? What the heck is this? Well, to explain that, we've got to break down some myths about how online communication works.

So let's break this down. You have you, your device, your phone, you wanna message your bae, so you just shoot him a text, right? They shoot a text back. That's how it works. <buzzer sound> wrong! That's not how it works.

This is what would actually happen. Alright, so you have your device, you have your bay, you wanna text them. But in between, there's apple, there's a cloud, there's some server storing everything. There could be a social media overlord reading every single one of your messages. Or even the government. Either way, there's always somebody in the middle listening to your conversations, storing them, possibly selling all your data. And if they're storing it, that means that hackers have the possibility of getting into it, and then who knows where it goes? And what Veilid does is take out that middle man so it's just you and someone else chatting privately.

But wait! Ellet, if there's no servers, how does that even work? So let's break this down. You: little pink dot. Over here we have bae: little green dot. In between the two of you, rather than servers or some social media overlord, you have purple dots, nodes that are helping to transfer your messages. A node is just like you, except they can't read anything that you're writing because it is all encrypted, which keeps your data safe from prying eyes, and Veilid is a network made up of all of these nodes. Lots of them. Each node is a different app and can be a different, completely different thing. But they all support each other. It doesn't matter if one app is bigger than the other. They're all equal. So every bit supports the network itself. You're a part of the network, bae is a part of the network. We all are. So rather than the internet being, you know, Jeff Bezos's cloud, the internet belongs to all of us. With communication between us. How it's supposed to be!

Nerd alert! End-to-end encrypted, which is upgradable. It's written in rust with flutter bindings. Similar to Tor and IPFS, but faster. And it's completely distributed.

It's a brand new way of privately communicating with your friends. With no social media oligarchs, no government, and no servers storing your data, keeping it safe from prying eyes. Because Veilid is an open source app development framework, anyone can build any kind of communication app on top of it with privacy and security built in. We've built a great community of people working together to build apps that are secure and usable. All we need is you to bring your ideas and your talents to the project. So come check us out on Veilid.com, and on Twitter @VeilidNetwork, at least until we build something better. I hope you Learned something from this video and come join us on Veilid.

Meanwhile, Ellet out.