Signal designs their systems from the ground up to deliver verifiable trust mechanisms (via remote attestation) along with data minimization/zero-access encryption techniques.
> It seems there is no standard proper way to store private keys.
The gold standard for this would be a Hardware Security Module (HSM), which is essentially a device that stores private keys with certain guarantees of physical security (e.g, that private key material cannot be extracted from the device once it has been generated or placed there, and the device performs operations using the key material on behalf of some client).
HSMs in various forms underpin all sorts of cryptosystems that society depends on, because securing private key material at rest is essential. You'll find them everywhere from your debit/credit card, to certificate authorities, financial institutions, defense, and your smartphone.
For your use case, I'd recommend taking a look at Yubikeys. I did a writeup a while back on how to use them to store different types of private keys for various purposes:
Though other use cases for the appliance are given, it seems primarily designed for military applications?
It's designed to military standards and to be as individually transportable as other military communications equipment:
> Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 5 (IL5) accreditation
> rugged and portable design that meets stringent accreditation requirements like MIL-STD-810H
> The appliance can be conveniently transported in a rugged case
> Weighing approximately 100lbs, it's human-portable, making it easy to transport and deploy in various locations.
> disaster zones, remote research stations, or long-haul trucking operations
Military operations are all three of these.
Its design enables the offline self-hosting of cloud surveillance tools:
> Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance is designed to operate without any connectivity to Google Cloud or the public internet. The appliance remains fully functional in disconnected environments
> built-in AI solutions from the Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped appliance like translation, speech, and optical character recognition
I run a large Meetup group for software developers in the Tampa Bay Area [0]
We’re multi-platform, and essentially a technology vendor for other Meetup groups in Tampa ([1]). While our overall community spans ~4,000 distinct people, only ~2,300 of those are Meetup members [1],[2]
I’ve built a ton of unique integrations around Meetup, and have built a ton of custom integrations with Meetup’s API (such as [3],[4])
If you’d like to get in touch, please do send an email to the address on our GitHub org [5]. Would love to see more competition in this space!
I had a strikingly similar experience at my own university, and took things into my own hands somewhat by teaching a free, basic Git course each semester.
I've been working on Tampa Devs with the other co-founder since September of 2021, along with a group of really excellent volunteers.
We're a nonprofit that's loosely inspired by nyc's Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/). We host events, a mentorship program, and career development resources. All of which are free or very low cost.
Our community has grown to include thousands of local developers. It feels good to be part of something that drives a widely positive impact, especially on a local level. Anyone can do something similar no matter where they are, and I would highly recommend it.
For a cool technical angle, here's a talk I gave at a local conference on the tools we use to run our community at scale: https://go.tampa.dev/unityops.
Here’s one such example, which is also an interesting technical deep dive: https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/