SeaGL speaker Paige Peterson talks privacy, security, and freedom:

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

Paige is an advocate for open standards, user privacy and decentralized technologies. After receiving a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art practicing experimental tech art with a strong focus on complexity in nature, her interests were drawn towards decentralization as a concept that would bring reliability and sustainability into existing human-designed systems. Her job with mesh networking startup, Open Garden and becoming an organiser of the San Francisco bitcoin meetup put her at the center of the newest technologies with decentralization at their core. In early 2014, Paige met Scotland-based company MaidSafe, who are building a peer-to-peer Internet using the very principles of natural systems which she became attracted to many years prior, and she has been working on various communication efforts for them since.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

For almost a decade, a small but growing team based in Scotland has been researching and developing what it would take to build an Internet with privacy, security and freedom for all its users. It was observed that servers were the primary points of vulnerability in the existing Internet and that while there is no one central point of control, they not only allow but incentivize major points of centralization and dependency. By drawing inspiration from the resiliency of systems found in nature, MaidSafe has built an open source peer-to-peer network and developer framework with inherent properties of privacy, security and freedom for users and their data. I’ll be talking about how this system works and what to expect as a user, developer and node operator.

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

I have not been but am very much looking forward to experiencing the free/libre culture from this part of the world. I attended LibrePlanet earlier this year and had a great time bonding with folks who value freedom in software.