I'm a history major who built an air-gapped Bluetooth mesh to kill bots
jaww.io
jaww.io
> If a node isn't physically standing next to you, it doesn't exist on your network. As humans move throughout the physical world, the data propagates organically.
/applause
About 15 years ago I was working in a small boutique public relations firm trying to help clients rank for their names in Google when I started to learn about search engines and robots. I had to research things like python and crawlers and meta tags and html and figure out WordPress and eventually put the keywords in the right place and sure enough within a few days, our client ranked maybe third on the first page.
Recently I started thinking about this because the Internet today has some of the same big players and the same big problems. Bots. Data hacks. Disinformation. Back in January I started using Google Gemini to try and build something to circumvent this and I think I have something. It’s bluetooth, it never uses the Internet, it never asks for your email for your account and it allows you to share information with each other voluntarily - example, if I’m at the gym I can broadcast my workout and meal plans to anyone who wants them. Or if I’m at a bbq competition I can collect the recipes anyone around me wants to share. And it works in airplane mode.
So, let me introduce you to JAWW. That stands for Joint Asymmetric Working Web. It’s more of a protocol but I have a working app now. What does it do? It communicates what I want with people around me. Say I want to share my workout... I broadcast it to the room and anyone using the app can grab it. That share comes with a cryptographic signature that verifies I made it. And if that person shares it, or decides to fork it (no cards are “editable” but you can fork them), it will still always come with the original card and the chain of custody for who it came from and who authored it. The point is we have a verifiable chain of custody of information that can't be spoofed by bots.
Listen, I’m not that smart. I studied history in college and I’ve never taken a calculus class. Balancing chemical equations is the hardest thing in the world to me. But as someone who has grown up to see email, instant messengers, dial up, napster, and what the Internet has become today, I want to make a bold prediction: bluetooth apps and devices that never share information with the Internet are the solution we need to fix every problem plaguing the Internet today. Privacy… bots… disinformation… hacks… these problems cannot be solved by creating another new app using the cloud.
So, take a look, tear it apart, and if you want to reach out. Everybody reading this is probably a million times smarter than me, so at the very least let me encourage you to do what I’m doing better and faster with the problems that can be solved using bluetooth the way I am…
- Virtually bot proof - Never touches the Internet so ZERO vulnerabilities to the web - Cryptographic proof of humanity - Screen-time isn’t a goal... sharing good information with humans in context is - Give experts back the microphone
There’s a million problems on the Internet that aren’t going to be solved by the people who built it because their solution is always more servers, more connectivity, more screentime, more ads, more cloud. That’s not solving problems that’s creating more at a new scale.
Anyway, if anyone is on board with what I'm saying would love to connect with you and John Conner the hell out of the future. I built something that seems pretty cool and I have ideas about how it might change how we use technology, but I won’t be able to accomplish anything on my own.