­

FAQ

What is twister?

Is it open/free?

How does it work?

Does it scale?

What does it do? (twister features)

How is Bitcoin used here?

Can I mine Bitcoins with twister?

Promoted messages? Am I going to be flooded with SPAM?

How do you make money out of this?

Why should I trust you?

How secure is twister?

Why peer-to-peer?

Is any peer notified when I get online?

What is the threat model for twister?

What is the problem with Twitter?

I have nothing to hide, why do I need privacy?

Can't mass surveillance be stopped by law?

I've lost my private key, how do I get my nickname back?

Please! I would pay you to recover my key!

What's the difference between the DHT network and the torrent/swarm?

Is the block chain used to distribute user's messages?

Why can't I see my followers?

What about twister for Windows? Mac? iPhone?

45 comments on “FAQ
  1. pv says:

    love it..let me know when you get it going for windows.

  2. mye nyme says:

    re: Can’t mass surveillance be stopped by law?

    the law can not prevent what technology permits.

  3. Kasper says:

    Many questions. I’d like to see a table with a comparison with other services. So, is there a wiki somewhere already? (:

  4. pedro picapiedra says:

    completely busted my battery on the note II.

    Installed it, went from day and a half to 10 hours of battery.

    Uninstalled it didn’t solve it. Did a factory reset, solved it. Reinstalled, same thing happened. Some process must be left hanging around there.

    Not worth using yet on Android

  5. Rick Romero says:

    The direct message encryption implementation is based on a sample code which was posted on the internet by Ladar Levison of Lavabit. We all know that Ladar has shut his site down because he refused to cooperate with the US government allowing system-wide monitoring of his clients. We can only reason that if Lavabit encryption were fundamentally flawed the authorities probably wouldn’t need to go through all of this hassle just to break into a single user’s account.

    Research ‘at rest’ encryption. That’s what Lavabit did. Not only that, but he was providing unencrypted data to the Feds prior to the SSL Key request. The SSL Key request came after the Feds wanted a real-time wiretap, and Levison requested $2k to implement it (and another $1.5k after 60 days). The REAL reason the feds wanted the SSLKey wasn’t because Lavabit was ‘hard to crack’, but because the data was in plain text, trivially available, and Levison was trying to rape the government for the data.
    So who do you trust more with your data? A lying businessman, or the government?

    You should be using public/private key encryption. Not some half-assed effort by an amateur.

  6. Andrew says:

    Nice project!!

    It would be nice if you could make it easy to use this system on top of I2P and Tor.

  7. Andrew says:

    (that would require you to be able to use crypto hashes instead of ip’s for the transport)

  8. Chris Gagne says:

    Hey, check out the design work some of us did on a Google Hackathon project we called SilentLens. Might be a source of ideas or inspiration for you. :)

  9. DannyNullZwo says:

    could you include a read only view of the network on this site?

  10. Karl says:

    Working fine but slow on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (AT&T). Look forward to increased performance and UI. But the product is looking great at this time and price. :-)

  11. M s says:

    Speechless. I think this is brilliant. Getting behind it, and hoping it moves forward. Could we expand this to create a secure Internet complete with pages and sites?

  12. Shevek says:

    More questions: is it possible to build a web who shows the general public timeline?

    • mfreitas says:

      Yes. But there is no “general/global timeline” concept, the timeline is the collection of posts of a certain group of people you follow. So, yes, it is possible to build a public web server to show posts but you must specify the user(s).

      • msb says:

        And how do I find people to follow? How can I browse the people who are already there, to find interesting people and follow them? This FAQ is full of technical details, but it doesn’t have enough information to give me a precise idea of how it works, from the end-user perspective. :-/

  13. AracooL says:

    Why in the FAQ there is no list of ports?

  14. kanga says:

    Thanks Miguel! I’ve long been wary of the social media sites and amazed at what people are giving over with some of their posts. I lost a few posts on twister recently, but I hope that’s just a hiccup.
    Freedom and privacy matter. Twister helps us maintain them.

  15. Sunk818 says:

    As for searching… Ufc Berkeley wrote a paper in 2002 regarding complex queries using dht http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1350&context=cis_papers

    I’m thinking this platform could be used to have torrent site that can not be taken down… ;)

  16. Eli Kleine says:

    Acording to this faq it is possible to connect twister through tor but it doesnt say how.
    Can anybody tell?

    • mfreitas says:

      It is not possible yet, but it’s being worked on. It will be just a matter of running twisterd with -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050

  17. Thomas Leske says:

    How come twister uses its own flavour of the Bitcoin protocol instead of using Namecoin?

    http://namecoin.info/

  18. Altoidnerd says:

    Nice work…built it easy peasy on ubuntu 14.04 … with a machine I had already prepped to build bitcoind however.

    Would love to see a simple machines forum…for questions. Like bitcointalk

  19. Love Chan says:

    Hello, author, I am from China users, under the windouws client is not stable, but the MinGW compiled by the client in the windouws is very stable, this is a Chinese compile client pan.baidu.com/s/1kTqSH2R

  20. Jesse Taylor says:

    Thanks for your work on this Miguel. This looks like a very promising and useful application, and I hope to see this completely replace twitter as it becomes more “finished” and user-friendly.

    I have a question though: Is there a technical reason that these protocols could not also be used as the basis for a P2P blogging platform that does not have the short character limit? That is, is there a reason that the techniques you have used here only work for micro-blogging, or would it be feasible to use the bitcoin/DHT/bittorrent to create a more generalized p2p publishing/communications platform?

    • Denny says:

      I was wondering this too… the 140 character limit for Twitter (and clones such as identi.ca) is an arbitrary constraint imposed by Twitter’s ties with SMS input/output. If you’re not using that mechanism for I/O, there seems to be no reason to constrain to 140 characters – but is there a next limit above that, or could this be used for full-length blog posts etc?

  21. Mustho says:

    Great idea. I am looking for a Twitter alternative because Twitter is increasingly infringing on people’s freedom of speech by suspending accounts which publish information that makes US government unhappy.

    I encourage more people to work on this making it a Twitter alternative.

  22. kalon33 says:

    Hi,

    Thanks for your work. I’ve a question: Is there any way to delegate hashing only to a rpi (or BBB) with hashing USB keys like bitminers?

    I’ve that at home and would be pleased to help network providing these, while not using my server’s limited CPU power.

  23. liok says:

    Does twister make HWaddr change everytime when my pc connect to internet?
    when i ifconfig eh0 down then ifconfig eth0 up, my pc’s HWaddr changes everytime. So is this software cause this problem

  24. Crypto Vote says:

    What is to prevent someone from spaming the Twister network by creating millions of random names and eventually bloating the blockchain size to a point where nodes have difficulty syncing?

  25. Crypto Vote says:

    Something like this will cause problems:

    void spamTwister()
    {
    string strUsername;
    CKeyID keyID;
    CPubKey newKey;
    CKey vchSecret;

    for( ; ; )
    {
    try
    {
    strUsername = GetNextUserName();
    // Generate a new key that is added to wallet
    newKey = pwalletMain->GenerateNewKey(strUsername);
    keyID = newKey.GetID();
    pwaletMain->GetKey(keyID, vchSecret);
    //Post messages to create more bloat
    }
    catch (int e)
    {
    //goto next username
    }
    }
    }

    I think Twister needs to make it computational difficult or expensive to register a new user.

  26. Dear Miguel,

    I’m writing from the ICT4Peace Foundation in London, from where we’re running the “Tech Against Terrorism” initiative in collaboration with the UN Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee in New York.

    This initiative is UN Security Council-mandated and focused on delivering practical assistance to technology startups facing potential terrorist and extremist exploitation (typically those that provide content sharing platforms, communications services, data storage and fintech tools).

    As a communications platform we think Twister could make an important contribution to this debate as well.

    Our website is at http://www.techagainstterrorism.org with more information about the project. It’s being run in partnership with major technology companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, startups including JustPaste.it, Yellow, SoundCloud and TransferWise, and various incubators and coworking hubs in the UK and elsewhere.

    The initiative represents both a response to rising political pressures on technology companies large and small to do more to combat terrorism and extremism and a recognition that many new and emerging firms are looking for greater resources and capacity support to better protect themselves and their reputations.

    We are looking to identify tangible ways in which the initiative can best provide immediate assistance to relevant companies (particularly on technical and legal matters) and longer-term support through the development of online tools and web resources. We’d really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you about these issues and industry-led responses to them.

    Hope to hear from you soon.

    Best wishes,

    Tech Against Terrorism

  27. Amr says:

    Couple questions, after 4 years now, how many users are using the system?

    I am thinking to help in creating the iOS app for Twister. Did anybody start on doing that already?

    Technically, we need to differentiate between regular nodes and mobile clients, like mobile clients need to be light, no need to have blockchain, mine, and so on. Also we can use DHT for mobile clients to locate other users, tags, and so on, without the need to have a local blockchain ledger. Is that possible to do?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>