There is a site called utopia.fans that makes articles about digital security and privacy and one of the products they recommend quite often in their articles is Utopia, hence the name. What is this Utopia? Did you guys use it? Is it trustworthy?
I clicked around on utopia.fans and found a link to their page. They claim to provide an “[…] all-in-one kit for secure instant messaging, encrypted e-mail communication, anonymous payments and private web browsing”, although they do not seem to publish their source code of their infrastructure (taken from their FAQ):
Why Utopia is not open source?
We may disclose certain parts of code, specifically related to communication and encryption. However, the decentralized protocol will not be released. Utopia is very knowledge-intensive software. A lot of time, effort and resources went into this product, and we do not want to share all of our know-how as it will result in forks which in turn may result in instability of our main network. Fork will lead to the division of the community, while our intention is the unification of the community of like-minded individuals. The bottom line here is that a lot of software is closed source, and this does not hurt them a bit. In addition, we will audit our code.
They also advertise their own crypto currency “Crypton”, which can be earned by “by running Utopia mining bots online”. The devs themselves want to stay anonymous forever (see here), which kinda leaves no information on their business model.
I would personally not trust them with my data before they release the source code of at least their client applications; but maybe someone else knows more about them :)
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Agreed. In the end they’re asking their users to blindly trust a closed-source platform made by anonymous authors. Good luck justifying that.
It’s a dodgy-ass site that keeps showing up on Lemmy due to the shilling efforts of one single user: @[email protected]. Just look at his posting history. It’s ALL utopia.
Downvote, ignore and move on with your life.
@[email protected], @[email protected], I want to ban Junker for blogspam, but I’m not sure if that’s the right call. Thoughts?
Edit: I’ve banned and removed their posts.
Seems like the right move to me. They are clearly a shill.
So we’re throwing people off the platform for breaking rules which we invented after we broke them?
No spam has been one of the rules since the rules were made official.
I’d agree with that.
Yep sounds fine to me.
Huh, I didn’t know about this user I just came across the “service” through utopia.fans.
Crypto + closed-source + strange look = big BIG scam ahead
Oh dear… this looks real bad.
Yes I’ve also been hearing cautions about it. I had joined up initially to test it but have left it idle for now until more is known about it. One comment I got back referred to Utopia’s FAQ and reasons for not being open source, with the assurance that they would audit themselves:
From their FAQ: Why Utopia is not open source? We may disclose certain parts of code, specifically related to communication and encryption. However, the decentralized protocol will not be released. Utopia is very knowledge-intensive software. A lot of time, effort and resources went into this product, and we do not want to share all of our know-how as it will result in forks which in turn may result in instability of our main network. Fork will lead to the division of the community, while our intention is the unification of the community of like-minded individuals. The bottom line here is that a lot of software is closed source, and this does not hurt them a bit. In addition, we will audit our code.
I installed it on a test computer. Worked for a while, but started crashing after one minute of start up, so I uninstalled. If you have a spare computer that will exist only to run it and not have any other data, might be worth of a test.
Looking at the comments it seems they are a scam, thank you for the response.
