Wow! It has been a crazy year thus far. Time passes by when you’re having fun.. and when we mean having fun, we mean fighting against political factions and corporations who seemingly enjoy stripping away our freedom and rights! Yippie!
During Q2, uPlexa has been focused on a variety of issues. Here in Canada, Bill C10 has was nearly passed! Woo! A government organization, the CRTC, almost had the chance to determine what Canadians see or do not see on the internet. Luckily, this one of many authoritarian bills got turned down. Great job Canada! The surveillance state is also looking to pass a bill on building a larger database of DNA, pretty much comprising of all Canadians. How does it work? Commit any crime? Carved your name into a bus seat? Well, now your DNA goes into the database. For... ever. Been wrongly accused and your trial has dropped? Well, Canada thinks they should still hold your DNA. Never committed a crime? Well, there’s a good chance your relatives have at one time… and guess what? IT’S DNA! Did you (unintentionally) drop a pop can on the ground after drinking it? Well, somebody committed a ‘hit-and-run’ next to that pop can, and now you’re our lead suspect! Another Orwellian bill is also on the table, Bill C-36, is aimed at limiting free-speech with rewards up to $20,000 for turning in your neighbor for any potential “hate speech”. The list goes on..
Enough of Canada though, what about other countries? Lest we speak about one of the largest growing surveillance states in the world.. China? No, that much is obvious. Australia! Another member of the five eyes alliance. Like many other countries, Australia deployed helicopters and drones to ensure their residents were not hanging out in groups of 2+. Much like Belgium did last year, having had launched heat-seeking drones that were legally able to define how many members were in a house via thermal imaging.
Australia, in-combination with.. Well, Big Brother, USA — has also recently been praised for using the Telecommunications Assistance and Access Act (TOLA — or Ass-access) for intercepting encrypted communications between supposed criminals. If you do not know what TOLA is, the TL;DR for it is: Ass-access forces tech companies to implement backdoors into their apps to give Australia the rights to intercept communications in such apps. Of course, if a company does not comply, Australia will simply fine them!
4/5 of the five eyes alliance down. Next on the list, the United Kingdom! Another glorified surveillance state has finally realized, maybe the surveillance is a little too much — after Matt Hancock (now former health secretary) was caught having an affair from his own government office’s cameras. It seems as spying on the elite is a little much, and that the surveillance systems should only apply to us everyday normies.
Of course, this only brings to light SOME of the issues within the countries associated with the five-eyes alliance. Not only are their numerous new bills being passed, but there’s ~188 other countries in the world we have yet to even mention.
What are we doing about it?
Clearly, since day one, we have been very enthusiastic about privacy and decentralization. With decentralization written in code, we can all properly agree on something and put it into code. This code, unlike humans, doesn’t have temptations to misuse nor break the rules of the code. See, us humans may originally agree on something, and the majority of us are probably pretty “good”. However, 1–2% of people with a even the slightest bit of power will always find a way to manipulate a centralized system. Always.
Privacy? We all utilize it, we need it to work as a society. We wouldn’t have porn if none of us wore clothes, if we didn’t keep our intimate encounters to the comfort of our own homes. Without privacy, we would openly inform anybody/everybody of our day-to-day personal issues, how much money we make, and our offensive jokes. But do we? Do we really want others to pull up everything we said 5–10 years ago to our friends or colleagues? There’s no way governments nor corporations would want to strip us of such basic human rights? Nor would they want to censor us from free speech?! Would they!? Oh — right, we already covered part of that above.
In Q2, we released the privacy bridge to Binance Smart Chain. On July 21st, 2021, we will also be adding support for the Ethereum Smart Chain, resulting of the creation of “wUPX” in which will be available on Uniswap. wUPX will be swappable at a 1:1 ratio (minus network TX fees) between UPX native coin and wUPX. On July 28th, the liquidity mining event will start for wUPX.
We also released Electralight wallet v3.0 during Q2. The latest wallet is comprised of patches to some minor problems such as: slow synchronization, cross-compatibility, and improved error handling. The release was made shortly after explaining how our users should shy away from web based wallets if their end-goal truly is privacy. This is due to the increase in political factions and corporations abusing users metadata and using footprint analysis in order to disrupt any form of user privacy, found most within browsers and browser add-ons.
Meanwhile, we have also been in talks with lawyers to navigate the incredibly complex legal system(s) around the world to accept funding and legally represent uPlexa as an entity. The entity, of course, would not have control over the future of the uPlexa project, but rather continue building decentralized privacy software(s) whilst structured as a not-for-profit organization… and we’re proud to announce the entity has been founded! The ‘uPlexa Foundation’ is a not-for-profit registered in Canada with three multi-national directors. The uPlexa Foundation is dedicated to helping our communities take back our power over our digital privacy and security.
More information regarding the uPlexa Foundation may be found here:
Of course, our main focus of the year, Plexanet, is still in works. We have explained much of how Plexanet will act as somewhat of a traditional VPN, only more secure, and more private. However, we have not talked about Plexanet hidden services much. Being that Plexanet uses onion routing, there are going to be hidden services on the network. The services are then unidentifiable, untrackable, and censorship-resistant. The dVPN is what users will use to access the regular internet as they know it, or “clearnet”. Opposed to hidden services, being much like Tor services (however, with Plexanet being much faster). Plexanet will give power back to the people, allowing them to choose which content is shown to them, which information they deem best for themselves.. rather than a political faction or centralized corporation dictating such options. Of course, Plexanet is a layer two solution built on top of uPlexa. Any service fees are paid directly to the network, and no customer data is tracked nor stored. Better yet, Plexanet will operate without network fees until a later date — in short, yes, it will be free for some time. When network fees are implemented, as previously stated — our goal is to keep service costs under $2/mo (USD) for users, making it not only more secure, more private, but also cheaper than traditional VPN software — with the added benefit of a high-speed mixnet.
We are excited to announce that the underlying mixnet architecture for Plexanet has passed core testing and will be integrated into the Steadfast Storm release. The current mixnet supports hidden services, but not yet exit nodes. The next step — adding exit nodes. Exit nodes extend the mixnet into the clearnet, and is to be considered the dVPN component of Plexanet.
In a world of doom n’ gloom, there is still hope. The majority of us are good people. We need to stay optimistic, yet still realistic about our present and what lays ahead of us. Most importantly, we must not forget our past. It’s not too late to change the trajectory of the future.. in-fact, it’s already happening.
