Chelsea Manning, Harry Halpin & Carmela Troncoso To Headline Nym Shipyard: A Bootcamp to Empower the Next Generation of Privacy Activists

The Free Six-Week Programme Will Address The Burgeoning Surveillance Economy And How To Fight It.

Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 4 October 2023 —  Nym Technologies, the a16z-backed pattern protection privacy company, is proud to announce the launch of the biggest-ever privacy bootcamp, Shipyard – a six-week event packed with lectures and hands-on workshops designed to inspire and empower the next generation of privacy activists, advocates, builders, and visionaries.

Nym Shipyard: A Six-Week Incentivised Privacy Bootcamp

Starting on 9 October 2023, the six-week bootcamp will offer participants the unique opportunity to learn from privacy leaders, with guest speakers including Harry Halpin, CEO and cofounder of Nym Technologies, activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and Carmela Troncoso, Fortune ‘40 under 40’ in tech and associate professor at the Security and Engineering Lab at EPFL in Switzerland.

They will be joined by prominent figures from the Universal Privacy Alliance like CEO at Aleo Alex Pruden, and Kenny Li, founder at Manta Network, plus many more guests to be announced. Promising to be an immersive and enlightening experience, attendees will learn all about the current state of privacy online, digital rights, and gain hands-on experience on how to build the future private internet using the Nym mixnet. 

Shaping the Future of Internet Privacy

On the one hand, legislators are criminalising privacy around the world, from the Kids Online Safety Act in the USA to the Online Safety Bill in Britain to French police gaining access to personal devices remotely. On the other hand, they are trying to protect privacy through regulation. Unfortunately, the first cancels out the second: back doors make digital communications unsafe for everyone. Nym Shipyard is a direct response to these developments: it aims to strengthen digital integrity directly through good, secure infrastructure design and the right incentives. Nym Shipyard is educating the next generation of builders and operators on how the right to privacy can be secured directly via internet infrastructure. 

Meanwhile, it is mass surveillance that has ushered in the age of AI. The food for these new, unaccountable machine learning algorithms is metadata: data about data that, when collected and processed, forms revealing patterns of behaviour about everybody’s digital lives, relationships, and even what they’re thinking. 

Nym has built a working ‘mixnet’ fit for achieving privacy in the AI age. Almost all technologies and practically every online interaction leak metadata. The Nym mixnet solves this problem by splitting all content into smaller, encrypted packets, before ‘mixing’ this to node operators all over the world and finally re-assembling and decrypting the content at the receiving side. This prevents powerful adversaries, even those with a full view of the network, from studying data patterns.

Shipyard will educate participants about the critical distinction between traditional surveillance and modern metadata surveillance powered by the algorithms of Big Tech and governments. 

The six-week Shipyard program will offer an intensive crash course in equipping the next generation of privacy activists, builders, and infrastructure operators with the skills to reclaim their digital lives.

The academy, born out of Shipyard, will also provide a permanent online resource accessible to anyone interested in mastering the intricacies of internet privacy and security. Continuous updates and expansion of the curriculum will ensure that the academy remains at the forefront of this ever-evolving field. 

Additionally, Nym Technologies aims to forge closer partnerships with universities and higher-education institutions to ensure this knowledge reaches a wider audience and is put to practical use.

“In the digital age, it’s imperative that we empower the next generation with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively combat the ever-evolving threats to digital privacy,” said Jaya Klara Brekke, Chief Strategy Officer at Nym, leading the rollout of Nym Shipyard.

“We are very proud of the graduates from our pilot program last year. It is time to turn it up a notch and go for a radical shift in consciousness at scale. We know the problem and we have the tools to fix it. So we are putting up a record 2.5m NYM token reward pool to onboard as many people as possible, showing just how things can be done differently. Graduates of Shipyard will not only gain a deep understanding of the privacy primitives currently percolating in the Web3 industry but also valuable resources to become leaders in the field, build, and start their own node operations. They’ll have the opportunity to participate in delegation programs for node operators, access community grants for visionary projects, and tap into our ecosystem fund for builders.” 

“It’s no exaggeration to say Shipyard completely changed my life. Before last year’s Shipyard, I lacked direction and was gaming up to 18 hours a day. I definitely didn’t care about privacy,” said Nym Community member, Pawnflake.

“I joined Shipyard for the tokens but the mission of privacy for everyone really spoke to me and I knew I had to get involved. I learned Linux. I learned to code. The Nym community supported me each step of the way. Now, I’m running Nym infrastructure and coding – I never expected this or even thought it possible. I threw myself into the mission to provide privacy for all of humanity, and that’s all thanks to Shipyard.” 

For more information about Shipyard and how to get involved, please visit the Shipyard website and register here.

About Nym

Nym is an open-source, incentivised, and decentralised privacy system that protects communications patterns of any application, wallet or digital service. Nym protects against traffic pattern analysis and metadata surveillance. Investors include a16z, Binance, Polychain Capital, Eden Block and the European Commission. 

For more information:  nymtech.net