[tor-talk] Tor and Thali

[Yaron Goland]

I want to introduce a project I'm working on called Thali. It is an open source (Apache 2 license) experiment to see what it would take to build a peer to peer web. You can find out a lot more at https://thali.codeplex.com


The core idea behind Thali is that users should be able to run their services on their devices, be that phones, tablets, PCs, etc. To enable that Thali provides a platform that consists of Embedded CouchDB + Public Keys as Identities authenticated over Mutual TLS Auth + Tor Hidden Services. We provide a platform over which many different kinds of apps could be run - blogging, micro-blogging, email, photo/file sharing, chat, calendaring, etc. Right now the first app we are experimenting with is called PPNET<https://github.com/pixelpark/ppnet>, an EU funded open source project to create a social network in a box. We are adapting it<http://thali.cloudapp.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=The_Thali_/_PPNet_demo> to run over the Thali platform. Our hope is that if Thali is successful then other people will write Apps on top of our platform.


Our code is primarily written in Java and runs on Android and in the JVM on the desktop. We currently have, thanks to Couchbase Lite, an embedded CouchDB server and we support generating keys, certs, etc. and using them peer to peer over mutual SSL/TLS auth. I'm now working on adding in Tor Hidden Services support. My plan is to try and make hidden services work on Android using the Guardian code and to use the mainline Tor code for the desktop.


And, of course, we can always use contributors<http://thali.cloudapp.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=Ways_to_Contribute> if anyone is interested! :)


        Thanks!


                Yaron