Stronger Together
A place for you to share and learn about being and feeling safe
Some of you may be new here, some of you may have been using this product for quite a while now. A big welcome to all of you, as we embark on a new journey.
It was back in 2011 the idea first came to me — frustrated with the lack of real answer to what to do with my passwords. The options available to me seemed flawed, all of them. Do I try to keep track of all my passwords in a file? Encrypt them with some app? Save them in my browsers? Upload them to a cloud account? Every option felt wrong to me in different ways, every option rife with flaws, and I could see then and there, if I wanted my own digital access secured into the future, none of these options would work.
I was fortunate to be in the position to do something about it –
My career as a software developer started back in 2007 (yikes, that's too many years from now). In my beautiful home-town of Ghent, Belgium, I began work in a small team of three on an ambitious identity management platform. We saw a splintered web, where users had hundreds of accounts, littered across the web, and only a handful of them actually kept up-to-date. We envisioned a central platform where you would manage your identity and services all across the web would then borrow from your centrally managed identity store.
It was early, maybe too early, but what we developed back can now be seen in a still-fragmented state under "sign-in-with-google/facebook/twitter". Sometimes I'm sad we were unable to really change things for the better, but it was a vital step in the journey.
And so I decided, "how hard can it be?".
Step number one: forget everything you think you know about what passwords are.
Step number two: how can we apply the core principle of passwords to the problem of millions of websites?
So was born a stateless deterministic algorithm, its first job: securely generate the password for my websites without allowing anyone else to do the same or reverse the process.
Solutions want to be free, and so I offer Spectre to you – free as in freedom, fully documented and open source.
Please feel free to use this community to discuss Spectre as well as any adjacent digital privacy topics.
Delete your passwords.
