Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
TheOoL: The idea behind the Oracle of Liberty project was conceived by CEO Alex Nenashev back in 2018. The objective was to solve the problem of breaching the privacy of online users while they interact with cloud services and search systems. We made it our mission to enable users to enjoy ultimate privacy without compromising usability and Quality Of Service and without ditching user-friendly and advanced technologies.
In the two years that followed we put together an efficient and highly professional team. This team conducted a number of research studies and the results had underpinned our core approach to developing our products and enabled us to build mathematical models of our key technologies, including the serverless search engine, the serverless system for data access, and the “Green Proof of Work.” In 2020, we incorporated TheOoL, Inc. in order to further develop our solution called TheOoL.net.
TheOoL.net is a super-secure distributed information ecosystem that provides users with private space and the ability to transact without creating a ‘digital footprint’ on the internet. It also provides affordable, high-speed cloud services for secure distributed computing and cloud storage services at optimum prices. Resource providers and content providers are able to securely and automatically trade in computing resources and information. And our ecosystem makes private payments fast and secure.
It comprises decentralized web hosting services with the serverless security and content control system on its private and secure distributed cloud for data computing and data storage. The ecosystem’s economics is underpinned by smart contracts within our decentralized payment system.
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
TheOoL: We offer users a secure model for interfacing with content and our search system, where users are at liberty to independently determine which data they want to share with others, for example, a user may elect to conceal information about the date of publication and the owner of the content. And TheOoL does not collect any particulars about information viewed by any user.
Individually, an online user interacts with TheOoL as securely as if they operated any local offline device. In the group mode, users operate as if they were on an intranet with private servers having no internet access. This enables them to develop TheOoL-based secure corporate applications for remote collaboration with no additional protection systems, layered on top of the internet.
In the public mode, TheOoL operates similar to TOR and I2P networks, however, we are different in two major ways: First, we provide integrated, secure, and high-speed serverless hosting services for content. Second, we offer our secure and private search engine which makes data search in TheOoL.net as simple as searching data on the clearnet. Admittedly, data search in the major private networks is far from simple and secure.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
TheOoL: Our product is truly unique in that it is a successful combination of rather incompatible qualities: Total privacy and the ability to easily deliver content to general public users coupled with the best properties of centralized systems, such as speed, availability, performance, and user-friendliness, as well as the best qualities of peer-to-peer systems, primarily including their fault tolerance and protection from opinions and behaviors of the system owners and staff.
Last but not least, TheOoL.net is truly eco-friendly. Like any other blockchain system, our network is controlled by TheOoL consensus algorithm. It commands no energy costs on top of what’s required to perform useful work: Our unique ‘Green Proof of Work’ algorithm makes it possible. And we at TheOoL are concerned about the environment so we take these concerns into account when developing all our technical solutions.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
TheOoL: We believe a widespread (online) breach of privacy is the worst threat, not just to cybersecurity but to our surrounding medium and social institutions. Social media, indexing services, internet providers, banks, governments, etc. all have access to personal data and, as a result, anyone can gain that access due to human error, malicious exposure, or corruption. It is no secret that the vast majority of online crimes are directly attributed to abusing personal data.
These crimes include direct theft of credentials (e.g. passwords) and using personal information for attacking with the techniques of social engineering, including aggressive targeted advertising, which is not a crime de jure but compels people to make irrational and superfluous purchases. As a result, humankind produces huge piles of garbage and burns insane amounts of hydrocarbons thereby causing irreparable harm to the environment. We, therefore, consider it to be a de facto crime against humanity.
Finally, the abuse of personal data gives rise to the worst type of crime, namely human rights violation. It provides wide-ranging possibilities for persecution on the basis of ‘incorrect’ beliefs and deprives people of their inalienable rights to information and privacy and correspondence, which have been granted by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.