Trustworthy Internet — Safe, Fast and Reliable

19 min readDec 10, 2020

We are overwhelmed and humbled by the feedback we have received from our early alpha customers. With early alpha subscriptions for a simple MVP, customers have endorsed our vision and we are more confident than ever towards our mission to design and build a better Internet — A Trustworthy Internet.

Thank you for all the positive and critical feedback!

We have embarked upon a massive mission of designing a better internet for the consumers and businesses alike. Easier said than done, but then if it were about doing easy things, what would be the fun in that?

So, What is “Trustworthy Internet” after all?

Well, here is the answer:

tl;dr

As a design philosophy, — Trustworthy Internet guarantees Reliable Information, Secure Conversations, and Safe Transactions. The consumer has an assurance that they are engaging with trusted entities without compromising their privacy.

At qikfox, our job is to design the future of ubiquitous Trustworthy Internet. The entire toolchain — Internet Browser, Search Engine, Security Devices, and Endpoint Security Systems need a reset. One step at a time, we are determined to innovate towards making internet safe, fast and reliable for the consumer.

There is no easy fix. To design a better internet, we have to solve three big problems:

Reliable Information: All information is not created equal and when search engines are determined to serve a buffet of information from billions of sources, it is left up to the consumer to decide what sources to consume. In the name of objective and subjective information, Search engines have mastered the art of serving deceptive information (biased or unreliable). From search engines to social networks to instant messengers, we need to find ways to serve reliable information to consumers.
Secure Conversations: Communication is a basic human need. People communicate across systems, this results in a scattered communications footprint and an increased risk for the consumer. It is difficult to safeguard the consumer from eavesdroppers, hackers and scammers if consumers communicate across a wide range of applications. The best way to empower consumers to communicate safely is to give them an integrated communication platform. If a consumer can send the emails, voice calls, tweets, messages etc from a single unified system, the system can ensure safety and security comprehensively.
Safe Transactions: Transactions and payments have lived in enterprise silos for too long. A next generation internet access platform should foster an open transactions and payments protocol that can be adopted by businesses to share transaction, order and fulfilment status throughout the transaction lifecycle. With a click of a button, the consumer should be able to see who did they transact with, details of the transactions, and the overall status of their payments. From a ubiquitous open protocol to consumer experience, much needs to be fixed.

Regardless of conventional or peer-to-peer paradigms, participating entities should be able to interact and exchange information safely, privately and reliably.

Short History of the Internet

If I have been able to see farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants — Isaac Newton.

Since its inception in 1989, the Internet has evolved in bits and pieces. Contrary to the belief that the Internet came into existence between 1965–1970 (ARPA and all), the world wide web’s foundation was not laid down until march of 1990. It was in March 1990, when Cornell University connected with CERN via 1.5 Mbps link, the seeds of the Internet were sown. Seven months later Tim Berner Lee had laid the foundations of three fundamental concepts that govern the Internet even today:

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI / URL)
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

By the end of 1990, Worldwideweb app and http server had been created by Tim Berner Lee and the first webpage was served. After realizing the potential of his creation, Tim and his friends evangelized opening up of the technologies royalty free to the public. It was not until April 1993 that CERN made a decision to open source.

In 1994 Tim Berner Lee moved from CERN to MIT and founded W3C — The world wide web consortium and in April 1994 Netscape was founded. Version 1 of Netscape was downloadable by December of 1994.

A new era of Internet had begun.

This was quickly followed up by Microsoft launching Internet Explorer in late 1995. (The reason I ignore Mosaic is because it was more of a side-note to entire Netscape and even Microsoft Explorer saga).

So, you see, the Internet is not that old after all — give or take 30 years (3 decades), no wonder much needs to be fixed, reshaped, and rehashed.

In their defense, Early web proponents did come up with some very revolutionary ideas. Some key principles of Internet design were:

Open Standards: The standards should be accessible to all. Compiled, debated and finalized in the full view of the entire world.
Universality: Computers and devices need to speak the same language to participate on Internet.
Decentralization: There is no central authority, or should we say the quintessential kill switch.
Non-Discrimination: Internet Service Providers will not charge differently for different type of services or discriminate against subscribers (net neutrality).
Consensus: For standards to work, the governing body should be democratic and participatory. Various stakeholders should have a say in development of standards.

These ideas were quite revolutionary for their time (in tech).

Security as an afterthought

Well, I shared the history of the Internet for a reason. It is easy to see how one thing led to another and the result was a basic globally connected network of computers and networks. It was, after all, a creation of but one man attempting to solve his document retrieval problem. Consequently, there were numerous glaring gaps in the vision that (in time) have become a huge burden (tech debt) to fix.

Early Internet was a hurriedly assembled soup of informational documents, a viewer (the browser) and a document server. Within an year or two, all hell broke loose and before we knew html and http (a lousy/limiting protocol) were the gold standards. Numerous protocol-designers and architects have been trying to fix this mess ever since. Without undermining the contributions of many, it is easy to deduce from historical facts that there is certainly a case to be made for a better version of Internet that is safe, private, reliable, fast, immersive and ubiquitous.

Originally, when the Internet was created, the use cases were limited to resource sharing and basic information retrieval. Security was not an integral design goal and when the Internet exploded, it left software and hardware vendors scrambling to discover and fix the security holes.

The fact that millions of consumers get scammed daily is a clear indication that whatever safety and security mechanisms were created were not and are not good enough even today.

To put things in perspective: SSL 1.0 was so bad that Alan Schiffman and Phillip Hallam-Baker (renowned security experts) broke SSL in 10 minutes of Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape) presenting it at an MIT meeting. The story has been the same ever since. A new version of SSL or TLS comes out, and so does the list of vulnerabilities. Consumers suffer.

Here is a partial list of vulnerabilities related to SSL and TLS. This list keeps on growing and new vulnerabilities found because there is a fundamental flaw in how browsers approach Internet Access. It is like internet security experts chasing their own tail.

The explosion of Websites

By early 1993, number of web servers sending data across the net had jumped from 50 to 250. Number of websites rose from 130 to 623 and number of hosts to around 1.5 million. The clunky and hacky network had taken off and the cat was out of the bag. By the end of the year, The White House, Library of Congress and United Nations were online and number of websites had jumped to 10000+. By 1994, Netscape under Mark Andreessen had improved the Mosaic experience and made it more graphical and user friendly. The consumer internet had started to explode. By 1996, approximately 40 million consumers were using Internet and online transactions hit the Billion dollar mark. By 1998, 2 Million domain names had been registered.

The phenomenal adoption of the Internet was never accompanied by a comprehensive redesign of the building blocks of Internet. Operating System vendors, Internet Browser Companies and Web Server developers have been playing a catch up ever since. They are simply not positioned to innovate and rethink the Internet from ground up. Today’s Internet technologies are a bulging collection of band-aid solutions and patch work. No wonder, millions of consumers are being scammed every day. Internet was never designed to keep them safe. To put things in perspective, The Chart below shows the Internet adoption year over year.

Today 27000+ new Internet users are being added to the mix every hour. On one side this is amazing and on the other scary. There are more targets for online scammers and hackers.

Same old, same old in a new bottle

This is how Netscape browser looked in 1995

This is how Google Chrome looks today

Not much has changed for the consumer besides a few UI bells and whistles. Well, you would say .. Sir! I disagree. There have been a number of amazing innovations. Here is the laundry list:

HTML is bigger, better and more HTML (New tags help google scan you better)
Javascript is now more powerful, less vulnerable. (Well, thank you for doing your job right, finally).
We can cache and speed up your browser experience. (Ah! it took you 20 years to realize this? Good for you!)
We care about your privacy. (Does not give me much comfort, are you not the ones who were stealing my data in the first place?)
We have a new protocol, its QUIC, and it has a new name HTTP/3. (Yay, Search and YouTube run faster, don’t they? At least the web benefits.)
Extensions are awesome. (and they help suspect entities track my web activity).
Web Specs are improving. (at a snail's pace).
We have search integrated left, right and center — the one that we own. (who does that benefit? Consumer, you would say. )

At the fundamental level it is the same old wine in a new bottle. The Web Browsers have matured to become better HTML-CSS-Javascript viewers for sure but the innovations are very few and far inbetween. In fact, the truth is that Browser software vendors are unable to get to a stage where they can really focus on consumer problems w.r.t Internet access.

Someone has to.

Internet needs a RESET

At qikfox, we have set out to challenge the status quo with a humble goal of imagining a new Internet that ensures better technological and social outcomes.

Innovation alone cannot ensure a good social outcome. It has to be the right kind of innovation where the positive social outcome can be quantified.

Since its inception, the Internet has grown many fold. The beast has outgrown its original design. Here are some Internet facts that may put things in perspective:

If you think the Internet is big today, hold on tight — it will get bigger. Out of 7.8 Billion people, 4.4 Billion have access to the Internet. There is still room for growth.
By end of the year, 35 Billion IoT devices will be connected to the Internet and by 2030, this number is projected to grow to around 125 Billion devices. Internet of computers is now the Internet of Things.
There are more than 4.2 Billion web pages being served via 8.2 Million web servers.
There are more than 366 Million Domain Names on the Internet. Around 180 Million are active.
1.3% of global population controls and serves the digital content being consumed by the rest of us.
Google averages 7 to 10 Billion queries daily. This means people are looking for stuff online. With searches come the scams.
Around 50 Thousand new domains are registered every single day. More than 60% are created by scammers, spammers and fraudulent entities.
300 Billion emails are sent and received daily.
60 Billion messages (instant messaging apps) are sent daily. Messenger, Whatsapp and WeChat are by far the most dominant messaging apps.
56% of all traffic is generated by bots, crawlers, hacking tools, spammers and impersonators.
Search engines can easily be gamed and manipulated to induce bias and fraudulent search results (SEM to run deceptive ads and SEO to rank higher).
Internet Browsers are being used as instruments to gain control over Internet traffic. Google and Bing search’s tight integration with Chrome and Edge is meant to drive ad revenue.
Google pays Firefox and Apple to feature google as the default search engine on their platforms (and in their browsers). All roads lead to Rome.
More than 60% of the DNS queries go through a few hundred DNS servers owned by corporations like Google and a handful of others.

The Internet has grown way beyond a simple network of computers and networks. Computer Hardware and software stacks have been scrambling to keep up with this massive onslaught of users, information sources and devices. With all the advances in hardware and software, millions of consumers are still being scammed daily.

The Internet needs a reset. We need to rethink the building blocks from the ground up and innovate to meet the needs of today’s consumer.

Designing a Trustworthy Internet

Consumers access internet in numerous ways — search engines, web browsing, emails, instant messengers, and apps. To us, it has been clear from the very start that “Trustworthy Internet” problem cannot be solved by attacking problems in silos. Reliable Information, Secure Conversations and Safe Transactions — all three have to be tackled as a unified whole. Redesigning the building blocks has to go hand in hand with backward compatibility.

With today’s advances in technology, we should easily be able to modernise the Internet stack and ensure that consumers get enhanced experience and peace of mind. Further, we have to ensure that the modern Internet is equitable, decentralized and democratic.

Though we have set out to disrupt the status quo, we are not jumping into this blind. We have experimented, built proof-of-concepts, ran marketing campaigns, conducted extensive market research. We have empirical data to back our theory — Consumers are willing pay for privacy, safety, security and peace of mind. Based on our findings, we finally came up with a list of design goals:

The next generation Internet should be easy to use. It should be so easy and intuitive that consumers just know how to to use it without any training.
A key function of an Internet Access Platform should be to provide immersive experiences. We need to explore new formats beyond web pages.
User Generated Content means democratization of Internet. We need to make it simple for the consumers to curate, publish and share content with or without the use of mediators.
Search is integral to a digital lifestyle. Most scams originate from Internet search engines. We need to make Internet search safe for the consumer.
Secure conversations should be a norm. A modern Internet Access Platform should provide mechanisms for secure communication and collaboration across formats.
Safe Transactions are integral to a ubiquitous experience for the consumer. A modern Internet Access Platform should make it easy for the consumer to make payments, view invoices and track status of purchases.
Consumers should feel safe while accessing the Internet. It should be the responsibility of the platform to filter malicious sources. Consumers do not want access to 4.2 billion web pages. They want access to reliable information from reliable sources.
Consumer Privacy is important. A next generation Internet Access Platform should be built with Privacy and Security as a fundamental building block. Consumer should be in control of their identity, data and content.
We need to decentralize the Internet once again but decentralization does not mean compromising with reliability or user experience. Peer-to-peer Internet needs to be rolled in seamlessly with existing Internet paradigm.
Finally, the term “Browsing” may have a new meaning. It means the ability to browse your home, your surroundings and the digital web.

Besides the above mentioned ten design goals, there is an additional fundamental design philosophy — Don’t reinvent the wheel, use the existing set of technologies as a springboard to improve the experience for the consumer. Design it for a ten year old and a grandpa; make it work for them.

We are cognizant of the fact that it is a massive undertaking, and we are determined to see our vision through. We have a robust 2-year roadmap in place and against all conventional wisdom we have taken our sweet time to design a next generation Internet Browser with an integrated experimental search engine. If all goes well, we are all set to release the first version of qikfox Browser in January 2021. We sincerely believe that we have made an honest attempt to change the status quo. Hopefully the consumers agree with us.

The Product — qikfox Smart Browser

qikfox Smart Browser — Safe, Fast and Reliable

qikfox browser has been a labor of love. It has been 10+ years in the making, at least in my head. All these years, I never stopped asking questions on what people liked and hated about the Internet. Besides empirical data, this historical romanticism has certainly played a role in the development of qikfox browser. You have to time travel to be able to connect the dots.

We kicked off development in June 2020 and here we are — Navigating our way through business challenges thrown upon us by Covid-19. We are nearing the launch of qikfox browser version 2.0 (there is no version 1.0) — have always wanted to launch with version 2.0 just for the kick of it (my subtle way of remembering Lashlee-Ashton-Tate / Dbase 2.0 — the first PC database I worked on).

qikfox browser has a relatively mature technology stack for a version 1 product. Mostly, thanks to all the hard work put in by Chromium team to establish a baseline. Chromium team has indeed made technology leaps that come in handy and make our life easier, especially when our focus is to make the lives of consumers easy. A big shoutout to Chromium team for fixing the technical nuances. Nerds can continue using Chrome, qikfox browser is for the rest of us.

We have a massive vision. Fixing the entire Internet stack is no easy task and hence prioritizing features is the key to successful adoption. For the first version of qikfox browser, we laid down some tactical goals:

Achieve feature parity with other browsers
Improve the consumer experience by blocking Ads and Trackers
Enable verified source browsing (unverified sites get booted out)
In-built Antivirus (a key premium feature, downloads bring scamware)
Put Consumer in control of their identity (decentralized-hybrid)
Integrated Safe Search (experimental ad free search engine)
The Smart Stacks — Experimental new way of browsing

The overarching theme for the first version of qikfox was consumer safety (security and privacy of consumer and their data), enhanced experience (integrated ad blocker) and laying the groundwork for consumer-friendly decentralized internet. We are proud to say that have managed to achieve all the established baselines for this version — just about.

There is more to come in the future. Be it the software stack, hardware or IoT devices, we are determined to do whatever it takes to make the Internet more equitable and democratic.

Integrated Ad Free Search Engine

Consumers are concerned about compromised privacy and the awareness is at an all time high. Besides other factors, modern search engines are at the center of this debate. Search engines started as “discovery engines” and over the years have transitioned into “intent based marketing engines”. For every relevant piece of information that a search engine uncovers, there are on an average three ads that show up and skew consumer’s experience. The claim is to bubble up “objective” and “Subjective” content and the reality is “deceptive” ads and sub-par SEO optimized results. Not to say all search results are bad but it is easy for non-tech consumers to get scammed when they discover and click on fraudulent search results or featured ads on search engines.

One victim lost £160,000 after clicking on a link for an investment scheme from a scammer posing as a respected firm. Which is now calling for Google to take stronger measures to tackle scam ads, after finding fake ads are regularly appearing on the tech giant’s search results. (link to news story).

This is not an isolated incident, thousands of consumers get scammed every single day using search engines. Search engines can just do so much to fix this. Fraudsters get ahead of them every single time.

Search engines have a fundamental flaw — Advertisements. It is a lucrative business to make money by tapping into consumer intent. It is easy breezy — crawl websites, use a mathematical algorithm to bubble up matching results, and litter the results page with ads. Give these algorithms lofty names like page-rank and rank-brain and lure the consumer into believing that the world is a better place because of that. How so?

“Don’t be evil” was the phrase used by Google to convince consumers that they are not like Microsoft (microsoft was the perceived evil galactic empire). Turns out they were right, they are nothing like Microsoft. Microsoft never learnt to game the entire Internet, they did. I am not convinced that it was by design but like the early internet, one thing led to another in search engines too. Search engines became “marketing engines” with consumers being taken for granted.

So, the question is — how do we make a search engine equitable?

The answer comes from websites like Wikipedia. We need to remove the fundamental flaw (intent based ads) and focus on bringing the “real choice” to the consumer. Let the community decide what is best for them. Search engine proposes, the consumer disposes.

The role of a search engine should be to inform, educate and propose solutions, not serve biased results with ads littered left, right and center. Google and Microsoft can fix the search, but they won’t. After all, who wants to let go of a lucrative multi-billion dollar ad revenue? Certainly not the shareholders! Consumers can go to hell. Both search engines had more than 15 years to fix the scam ads, sub-par SEO optimized results, but they did not.

As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck (duck-duck-go is no different).

Along with building a next generation state-of-the-art browser, we have set out to fix search as well. We have to … we cannot design a next generation trustworthy Internet without tackling search.

The idea of an ad free search engine requires us to invent a new business model, and we have. To us “Internet Search” is not a product, it is a value added service to make qikfox browser more effective in keeping consumers safe from scams, frauds and other forms of online threats.

Blockchain and Decentralized Internet

We are on a mission to improve internet and make it more trustworthy for all participants (consumers and businesses alike). Blockchain, being the new buzz word helps in higher valuations, even if the underlying fundamental use cases are questionable. So, you see, the motivation of saying “we are blockchain enabled” is high; investors love it. No, thank you.

We know that decentralization is the next frontier and we have to navigate to it, but the current incarnation of decentralized internet along with its obsession with blockchain just does not fit the bill. It is too geeky and cryptic for the non-tech consumer. Due to the obsession with blockchain, the silicon valley startups seem to be messing up the peer-to-peer (decentralized) Internet.

Blockchain is helpful in solving numerous problems but it is not decentralized Internet. Once again, the geekdom has found a kryptonite and they are trying to fit it wherever they can, regardless of consequences.

Blockchain technologies are not mature enough to go mainstream as yet. We are starting to observe similar mistakes that we witnessed during the early days of internet. A use-case based siloed approach, cryptic algorithms and crypto-wallets, clunky consumer experience, and the punter central for many. This haphazard use-case based approach is not going to lead to mainstream decentralization of internet. For that to happen, the consumer has to be kept at the center of innovation.

Consumers are ready for the decentralized (more democratic) internet with freedom of expression but not when it comes at the cost of compromising safety, security, reliability and experience.

At qikfox, we have stepped back and carefully reviewed our use cases w.r.t to the benefits that blockchain based technologies bring. For example: We think it makes sense to use blockchain to decentralize identity, similarly it makes sense to enable content based name resolution, storage and retrieval mechanisms, and it can certainly be used to immutably record proofs of transactions. So, we will use blockchain based innovations wherever it makes sense but it is abundantly clear to us that decentralized Internet enablers go far beyond a distributed ledger.

We are acutely aware that in order to get it right, we need to keep consumers at the center of our design thinking. Decentralization means democratization of the Internet and we are not going to risk it on a merkle tree. We need to make decentralized Internet happen but in the right shape, form and manner. So, here is our take on it — The customer-centric goals for decentralized experience in qikfox browser:

Decentralized Internet should allow consumers to create, curate, and publish content directly to their audience (without any intermediaries).
There should be no difference between accessing a regular website vs consumer’s content directly from his computer.
Decentralized experience should be reliable. This means sites and content published via decentralized methods should be accessible quickly and reliably. Degradation of experience means lousy implementation.
Safety and Security should be central to the decentralized experience.
Peer-to-peer Communications and presence technologies should work seamlessly to enrich consumer experience.
Naming has to be as simple and reliable as DNS. In fact, it has to beat DNS with its simplicity.

Bottomline is that our focus is fairly and squarely on improving the overall Internet experience. We do not intend design anything for libertarians, anarchists, geeks and punters. We want to improve the experience for the rest of us — who happen to be 95% of us.

Synopsis

Original Internet was not designed for today’s problems. The evolution of Internet has been hijacked (defacto) by a few megacorps and that resulted in over centralization of the Internet. This needs to change for the Internet to be truly equitable, democratic and inclusive.

We, at qikfox, are determined to make that happen. Our story has just begun, the best chapters are yet to be written.

Buckle up Dorothy cause Kansas is going bye-bye.

/tarungaur
CEO, qikfox, Inc.