Diode is excited to be part of the US Space Force’s (USSF) defensive cyber operations program at the Catalyst Accelerator Defensive Cyber Operations (CADCO) this spring. Diode’s disruptive technology in blockchain defined perimeters is evolving the Internet and is helping enterprise expand their security perimeters for teams and assets.

“The Catalyst Accelerator, powered by the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate (AFRL/RV), exists to empower nontraditional technology companies to accelerate their involvement in the...

The Diode Drive 1.7.14 release is a minor update that includes the following improvements:

• Nomad Plan: The Nomad plan, Diode free evaluation plan, has been expanded to allow up to 10 team members.  We made this update in order to allow larger teams to evaluate Diode’s entry level features.
• Mobile menu: The user experience on iOS and Android has been improved to make navigating between Zones and within a Zone easier.  The “Quick Access”...

Slack has recently changed its pricing to require a subscription to a paid plan to retain access to older messages - this change has motivated a lot of people to look for a free Slack alternative.

Diode Drive is a content-first collaboration application that makes chat for teams more pertinent, more secure, and better to use.

Read below for how Diode can not only be used a free Slack alternative, but also as...

Diode Drive can be used as a secure note taking application for multiple devices. Many of us at Diode are ex Evernote users, and have been frustrated with the lack of quality secure Evernote alternatives.

With Diode Drive’s recent introduction of a note editor, we feel for the first time ever that confidential/sensitive information can be quickly, conveniently, and securely stored in our notes. Read below for how Diode Drive can be...

Diode offers a free ngrok alternative.

Ngrok is a service that allows you to publish services to the Internet and to remotely access local area networks and IT assets. Diode’s Command Line Interface (CLI) tool provides a simple interface to the Diode Network – enabling many of the same use cases as does ngrok.

Keep reading to understand how you can use the Diode CLI for free to accomplish many of the...

Diode Drive is a secure and confidential decentralized Dropbox alternative.

Diode Drive provides a self-custody solution for your information. Whether you are an individual or a company, you can use Diode Drive to maintain a secure information environment (e.g. HIPAA, GDPR, cross-geopolitical security, anti-scraping, de-google) without IT development or maintenance.

Read below for how Diode Drive can be a more secure, confidential, and affordable decentralized Dropbox alternative.

Diode Drive as a...

Diode Drive is a self-custody solution for your information. It gives you full control of who has access to your information and where it is stored - whether you are an individual or a company, you can use Diode Drive to maintain a secure information environment (e.g. HIPAA, GDPR, cross-geopolitical security, anti-scraping, de-google).

This post introduces recent new usability features: Linked Devices, Light Zones, and Deleted File Backups.

Linked Devices

A...

Decentralized Web Hosting is a way of hosting websites so that the website cannot easily be taken down or degraded by a service outage (intentional or not) of a given vendor.

Why Is Decentralized Website Hosting important?

The reasons for wanting to do decentralized web hosting, sometimes referred to as Web3 hosting, include:

1. Technical resilience of the website - the unintentional outage of one component does not bring the website down
2. Security and...

One of the drawbacks of cloud storage is the time required to upload and/or download large amounts of data. Depending on the amount of data, this process can take several days before everything is synced up. Diode Drive has now introduced direct connections. This means that team members can sync files and communicate directly with each other via the fastest connection possible. With a direct connection, files can sync exponentially faster, depending on your network...

Self-Custody is a term coined by the Bitcoin movement and long-held as the future of finance. It’s the ability to keep your account independent of a Bank, yet still more secure than ever before. When in 2015 the ATMs in Athens stopped giving out cash to their citizens a shock went through Europe making it clear to everyone what a custodian bank account can mean.

Why you should care about Self-Custody for data...

Diode Drive is a file sharing and collaboration tool that works with Windows, MacOS, Linux (ARM and X86), Android, and iOS. It can be used to share a file or folder without sending the file or uploading it anywhere - regardless if the recipient also has Diode Drive installed or not. It can also be used to collaborate real-time with Team Members - friends, family, and co-workers who do have Diode Drive installed.

In...

There are no inherently “cloud” components of Diode-based applications – they are decentralized systems, aggregating capabilities from the edge-connected participants. While that has many advantages (security, low-cost-of-maintenance, efficiency, accessibility), it means that some of the state persistence that centralized Web2 applications take for granted must be provided for differently in a pure Web3 / Diode environment.

In the case of Diode Drive, if all Team Members in a...

If you’re like me, you have a lot of devices. I have my work computer, family laptop, family desktop, phone, tablet, as well as a few other devices. My wife has several devices too, as do my teenage kids.

I have tried different methods to keep all our files organized, accessible, and shareable. Online options have file and storage size limits, I am never sure if my files are secure, and I have to provide...

It is surprising how hard it can be to upload files and pictures from your phone to your computer.

I used to use email to send the file to myself as an attachment. This would usually work, but had some problems:

• email usually has a file size limit so it may not work if the file is large
• multiple file attachments can be hard to keep organized
• the email will get buried over time,...

When we talk on the phone, our experience is one of directly calling another person - we no longer have to interact with switchboards, operators, and party lines. Those are things of the past, no longer necessary in today’s directly connected world.

Why isn’t file sharing like calling someone on the phone - a direct connection without the involvement of third parties?

Diode Drive makes this possible - it allows you to share files directly...

We’re very excited to announce the Public Beta of Diode Drive! Diode Drive is a great replacement for Google Drive and Dropbox for individuals and organizations who want to safeguard their digital sovereignty. It is a high security, end-to-end encrypted solution for file sharing, collaboration, and backup that prioritizes security and confidentiality.

If you’ve been looking for a way to share files over the Internet without uploading them to the cloud, Diode Drive is...

In an important step for evolving Web2.0 to Web3, Diode has released the ability to map a Web2.0 domain to a Diode Web3 Client Address! This enables any Web3 publisher to publish content on a Web2.0 domain. All 2, 3, and 4 letter Top Level Domains are supported. Previous to this release, Web3 content could be published only to other Web3 clients or via the https://{clientname}.diode.link Web2.0 subdomain.

This capability is important both...

We’re excited to announce that Diode core team is going to host a hands-on tutorial workshop with Taipei Tech Blockchain Research student group - also known as the National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT) Blockchain Research Club 北科大區塊鏈研究社 - on Wednesday night, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, October 28, 2020.

The Diode tutorial workshop is organized by Diode blockchain engineer Peter Lai, marketing manager Yahsin Huang, Taipei Tech Blockchain Research Club...

Keeping your Raspberry Pi Video project up and running 24/7 can be quite a task. With the Diode Client you have always access from everywhere and can easily share it’s video stream. In our previous Raspberry Pi post we focused on the built-in watchdog to keep survive hardware errors. But what do you do if the video fails on you?

There are different tools you can use to capture pictures from your Raspberry...

Diode is an open-source, blockchain-based, peer-to-peer network that enables software developers to build valuable decentralized projects. It’s the first and only blockchain-based Ngrok alternative that we’re aware of. Written in Go, Diode was developed by German engineer Dominic Letz and a few Taiwan-based blockchain developers.

Why should you choose Diode over Ngrok? This is one of the questions we get asked a lot. We believe that you have, at...

Diode’s blockchain engineer Peter Lai presented at the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters, or COSCUP – Taiwan’s largest, most popular open source tech conference on Sunday, August 2.

The feature image of this blog post is a group photo of Taiwan’s Golang community along with audiences from the Effective Go track at COSCUP – a great shot by one of the COSCUP’s professional photographers. More photos uploaded by COSCUP organizers...

Diode CTO Dominic Letz was invited to speak at Bangkok Enterprise Blockchain group on Wednesday, 29th of July, along with another speaker Jana Bulkin from Integrationworks Asia.

Organized by Atato, the online event “Enterprise Blockchain 10th edition: Blockchain and IOT!” drew engineers, developers, industry experts and makers from Thailand, Germany, France, Taiwan, and a few from Vietnam. We appreciate Atato CMO Maxime Paul for facilitating and moderating the event.

At Diode we have deployed a couple of long-running Raspberry Pis equipped with cameras and sensors reporting into our network 24/7. All these are under uptime monitoring for us to keep track of the network availability. Every time there is a software problem we want to know it. For that we’re using some external and internal tools.

Eventually we have run into a problem not related to...

Diode is an open-source blockchain-based peer-to-peer network that enables developers to create applications for various decentralized projects. One of the popular applications that is being developed recently is using Diode as a blockchain implementation of Ngrok.

To use Diode, the first open-source, blockchain-based Ngrok alternative, written in Go, install the Diode Client using the curl command:

$ curl -Ssf https://diode.io/install.sh | sh

Go to https://diode.io/download/.

Open a terminal window and...

Diode’s second livestream meetup event went live on Tuesday (June 30). The 30-minute online event drew some 20 engineers, developers, makers, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts from countries across the globe. CTO Dominic Letz and blockchain engineer Peter Lai were the featured speakers.

The meetup topic was about how to perform video streaming using Raspberry Pi Zero W via Diode network. Check out the Diode meetup presentation slides on Github. Watch the livestream-ed meetup on...

Since our last development update in February we’re now just getting over the extended periods of Covid forced home-office. While our Taiwan office was only little affected by Covid19 and has had business as usual since quite a time. In our German office we’re just returning now to a somewhat normal. Hope you guys are all well - keep safe. That said, let’s have a look at the development we got done in...

Our CTO Dominic Letz was invited to go on the Weekly DeFi podcast as a guest recently. Dominic and the Boston-based podcast host Thomas, did the interview over the Internet, talked about the future of the Internet, what is the Web3 revolution, how time is a fundamental problem with Internet security, what is the Diode Network, and more importantly, how you can make a positive impact in the Web3 ecosystem.

Have a...

On Tuesday (May 19), Diode’s highly anticipated live streaming event went live. The 30-minute online meetup event drew more than 35 engineers, developers, makers, and community leaders across the globe. CEO Hans Rempel, CTO Dominic Letz, blockchain engineer Peter Lai, marketing manager Yahsin Huang gathered together remotely to discuss some current and potential applications of the Diode’s peer-to-peer network.

We gave a...

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What is Diode?

Diode is an integrated Blockchain implementation of the Web3, the server-less internet and the decentralized web, targeted primarily at enabling IoT devices. It was designed to address the security and infrastructure needs of device-driven connected applications.

Diode’s first livestream event went live on Monday, April 27, in Taipei, Taiwan. The 2.5-hour online meetup drew more than 30 engineers, developers, makers, and community leaders. Below are some highlights from the event, which was moderated by Raspberry Pi Taiwan group leader Hsu, the featured speaker was Dominic Letz, CTO of Diode.

Watch Dominic’s talk on YouTube. Diode’s presentations slides are now...

This month, the Diode team spent a week in Paris for EthCC 3 event. Here is a recap of some of the most interesting things we have seen.

Hundreds of developers, researchers, investors, and aspiring founders gathered in Paris earlier this month for the third annual Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC). Held in the 5th arrondissement of Paris on March 3-5, CTO Dominic Letz and team members were...

With the next major client update the Diode network will be using a new Edge Network Protocol. Edge2 is replacing the current Edge1 protocol. Nodes will be supporting both protocols for some time until all clients are being upgraded. The new protocol brings major enhancements. First and foremost the protocol change enables full async messaging and will remove those pesky timeout issues. In addition the change from JSON to RLP for protocol encoding is...

The 4th Stanford Blockchain Conference (SBC) continues to educate attendees about the research and current issues around blockchain protocol development, cryptography, distributed systems, and crypto-economics.

The 3-day event was held from February 19 to 21 at Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford University in California. Hosted by The Stanford Center for Blockchain Research, the event was free of charge and open to the public. Our...

On Thursday, February 13 SustainWeb3 event took place in Denver, Colorado. Organized by the Gitcoin team, the one-day event drew hundreds of researchers, developers, and community leaders at Denver’s Sports Castle (same venue as EthDenver). Our team was particularly inspired by the talks of Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation) and Nathan Schneider (the University of Colorado Boulder). Below are some highlights from the event, which was moderated by

It’s time again for an update on our progress over the last quarter. While last September and October were busy with events, the recent couple of months we spent some time working on our Prenet. We’re getting ready to engage with the community again in several up-coming events:

• ETH-Denver running right now…
• Stanford Blockchain Conference
• EthCC Paris
• Vienna ECDON

But let’s have a look what happened so far.

Last week we released a demo on YouTube that shows how to get started with Diode. It’s a simple guide to help you get a Raspberry Pi connected to the Diode network.

To get started, here are the steps to follow:

1. Install Diode go client

2. Register a fleet contract with the Diode prenet website

3. ...

On Tuesday, December 24, we had the opportunity to present our work at the Golang Taipei Meetup. The venue was the very cool MaiCoin’s co-working space in Taipei City, which Taipei City Mayor Ko Wen-jen had once visited last August.

Thanks to David Chang, David Chou, Evan Lin and everyone who helped out with the meetup. We had a great time seeing the excitement and energy from the Golang...

In this article, we will outline the steps required to deploy a static website under your ens name. One example is my personal website hosting on IPFS using “yahsin.eth” my ENS custom domain. What it does is that anyone can visit https://yahsin.eth.link/, the browser would return an introduction of myself. It will work faster if the viewer has MetaMask readily installed. View a list of ENS+IPFS websites compiled by Almonit here: https://almonit.eth.link/

Diode, at its core, is a finality gadget with an Ethereum block header change. It’s enabled by a super-light protocol and client for constrained devices, allowing them to read contract state data and validate the corresponding merkle proofs. The finality gadget and algorithm are based on BlockQuick. View the Diode project on Github. In this blog post, we take a look back at the past few months and a...

This month, Diode CTO Dominic Letz and marketing team attended DevCon 5 and several off-devcon events in Osaka, Japan. In addition to meeting leaders of the Ethereum community, we also took the opportunity to discuss the challenges in realizing the Web3 vision on Day 3 at the Amphitheater.

We had a great experience at the conference. It was a pleasure to meet Ethereum Research core team, developers of Remix,...

Here is a curated list of readings and resources that ignited our interest in realizing a decentralized Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) vision for the future. We included topics such as fundamentals, Web3, blockchain, web PKI, DNS, time, IoT security, light clients, Ethereum, as well as development tools and tutorials. We are also collecting feedback for our newly published research paper about BlockQuick, a super light client protocol for blockchain validation. DM us...

Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have each received a lot of attention from industry researchers and investors alike over the past few years. However, it is only recently that the two technologies have begun to be considered together allowing participants to reimagine the potential for both, blockchain and IoT.

The major benefit that IoT offers blockchain is in its ability to act as a bridge between the physical and the digital worlds. In...

Last month, the trade association for internet service providers in the U.K. has nominated Mozilla for this year’s award of Internet Villain because Mozilla plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS that would bypass U.K. filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet standards in the U.K.

At Diode, we think Mozilla’s DNS-over-HTTPS in general is a good move for increasing the privacy of end-users; however, it is not the best option for protecting an open internet as...

Picture this: you’re sitting in a coffee shop with your laptop, and find yourself trying to connect to the internet, like most people, using a public wifi connection provided by the coffee shop. Wouldn’t it be nice to book a hotel room over the weekend, you ask your partner?

You click on an online reservation website, search for a hotel room to book, and you’re looking forward to the vacation. You may not be aware...

OMG! So it happens again. PKI the Public Key Infrastructure is a centrally rooted security infrastructure to encrypt nearly all of todays internet traffic. And is being used to crack all traffic in Kazakhstan.

Yesterday on the 18h of July 2019, the state-owned telecommunications organization of Kazakhstan started to misuse this central infrastructure in the states initiative against free speech. The now dictatorship of Kazakhstan is forcing its users to install a custom Kazakhstan root...

On Tuesday (7/16), Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, gave a 30-minute presentation entitled, “Harberger taxes for virtual property.” In his presentation (18 slides in English and Mandarin) at the first event of RadicalxChange Taipei, Vitalik looked at what Harberger taxes are and what are the ways to apply Harberger taxes for domain names. Vitalik’s presentation starts at 1:50:47 in the YouTube video.

You just decided to start your next project using blockchain. That is awesome congrats! But now you face the many choices: Which blockchain platform and clients are technically suited for your use case?

Makers and IoT specialists know that when designing embedded systems it’s important to understand the technical parameters within which each component can work. The same is true when selecting the blockchain technology. Required storage capacity on the device, RAM usage, and bandwidth...

China social credit system: the method to reward or punish citizens for their behavior is unclear

First announced in 2014, the Chinese government has been implementing a controversial social credit system. The system uses secret algorithms to evaluate the behavior of Chinese citizens, monitor their banking and social media information such as communications on popular chat app WeChat, violation of traffic rules, and countless other factors and criteria that the government is reluctant to...

Download full paper here (PDF).

Diode’s CTO Dominic Letz published a paper recently to give an introduction of BlockQuick, a super light client protocol for blockchain validation on constrained devices. One of the key concepts behind the newly proposed BlockQuick is that it plans to adopt a consensus-based reputation scheme to accept blocks. This article explores how blockchain synchronization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices can be achieved through BlockQuick consensus reputation table, as...

Earlier this month, Doug Madory, Oracle’s director of internet analysis, wrote in a blog post detailing a BGP route leak incident happened on Thursday, June 6. For approximately two hours, a massive amount of European Internet traffic was rerouted through China Telecom’s own servers. The Internet traffic was rerouted following a BGP route leak at Swiss data center colocation company Safe Host. Over 70,000 routes - comprising an estimated 368 millions IP addresses coming...

According to a report, Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov confirmed on Wednesday (June 12) that his popular messaging service experienced a “powerful” Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The DDoS attack disrupted Telegram’s services for about an hour. He later tweeted that the IP addresses involved in the attack were coming mostly from China.

“IP addresses coming mostly from China. Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests...

[Note: This post is a follow-on discussion to topics discussed in Introducing Proof-Of-StakeWork and requires some background knowledge in blockchain technology.]

In the last post on Proof-Of-StakeWork we talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages of both Proof-Of-Work (POW) and Proof-Of-Stake (POS) so I won’t go into those details here. The purpose of this post is to more fully articulate the vision and motivation behind Proof-Of-StakeWork (POSW) and to provide a little...

In May, Diode’s CTO Dominic Letz published a paper introducing BlockQuick, a super light client protocol for blockchain validation on constrained devices. The paper shows that unlike other existing approaches such as proofs of proof-of-work (PoPoW) and FlyClient, Diode’s BlockQuick super light client protocol is capable of protecting against eclipse attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks on a peer-to-peer network. But what is an eclipse attack? Is it possible to prevent...

If you’ve been following our blog, you will have heard us mentioning the term decentralized public key infrastructure before. But you probably don’t know what it is or how it works, let alone why it matters so much. In this post, we will examine current approaches to the traditional centralized PKI, explore the basics of decentralized public key infrastructure (DPKI), and then show how blockchain-based DPKI can make an impact as the industry transitions...

- Click here if you just want to read the Paper -

In the last two posts of this series, we first introduced the governance issues in PKI and then the circular dependency between establishing trust in PKI certificates and establishing the current time on a connected device.

So let’s break that circular dependency between time and trust. The difference between trusting a person/an entity and trusting data is key here. How...

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network virtualization have been the disruptor technologies that were fundamental to the success of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Compute, and Azure during the last decade. Before that, there were plenty of rival cloud providers - for most of them, changing network configurations, adding/removing machines to a network required human interaction and would take hours or sometimes days. Dedicated networking, networking...

The Diode Network enables practical distributed trust for IoT communications (and for other modalities as well). The implications of this for distributed IT infrastructure are significant. However, as the reality of distributed infrastructure emerges, other more immediate applications on the way to fully distributed infrastructure are also interesting. One of these applications is distributed wireless network operations.

For star topology wireless networks, as exists in today’s cellular communications paradigm, there are four primary things...

[Note: This post requires background knowledge in blockchain technology. We have provided links to background information.]

After determining a blockchain project’s reason for existence, the next most important decision developers and entrepreneurs must consider is the mechanism through which their network will arrive at consensus. There are many different types of consensus protocols, but the vast majority of them can be placed into one of two buckets, Proof-of-Work (POW) or Proof-of-Stake (POS). Many...

In order to trust a time source, we need to validate its...

You may not be aware of this but if you are browsing the web or running IoT devices in your business or at your home, you are being protected by a 30-year-old security infrastructure. In this post, we will uncover the history of the internet PKI that holds most of the internet together today and highlight some of the most obvious threats and known flaws. This article is the first in a series investigating the...

In Today’s internet, the authenticity of content is secured by the internet PKI system and the domain name registries. To make it all work first the domain name server (DNS), second you - holding the certificate and the corresponding private key and third a certificate authority which signed your certificate all have to agree on the same data to create this security.

A single miss like a domain name server pointing to a different server...

The public was aghast back in early 2018 when PwC Bitcoin specialist Alex de Vries estimated that Bitcoin servers consume more than 22 terawatt-hours of electricity per year which is comparable to entire countries such as Austria and Ireland.

To many, this was a brewing crisis that if left unchecked would render blockchains unscalable and unsustainable Even Bitcoin’s strongest supporters recognized that the energy consumption issue presented a barrier to growth and mainstream...

On Monday, Bleeping Computer published an article about the disturbing revelation that Dark Matter, a cybersecurity firm based in the United Arab Emirates, has aspirations to become a trusted root certificate authority in one of the world’s most popular web browsers.

A certificate authority (CA) plays an important role in the public key infrastructure (PKI) which ensures secure communication over the internet. CAs are trusted entities that manage, issue and sign digital security certificates that...

After months of incubation we’re excited to start talking about our new, we believe groundbreaking, initiative: Diode^SM Incubating within Exosite, we’ve been working hard to fix some of the fundamental shortcomings of PKI that are underlying 99% of all Internet communication today.

For the first time now it becomes practical, with Diode, to use blockchain technology to eradicate the issues with PKI for IoT devices. Our technologies work even on low-end embedded devices and...