Frequently Asked Questions
Why do you have such a long legal contract?
We have a separate page that describes our Terms and Conditions that is unfortunately long. We want to make sure that Red Pill owners understand what is included with The Red Pill.
SohoStar is a service business that provides certain support services: TruDns, CidrPress, WhereIsFido, and Fifth support to Red Pills. These are all included in the purchase of The Red Pill. They are also designed to keep operating even if the SohoStar sites get blocked or shutdown. Because everything is encrypted, SohoStar does not have the ability to monitor your social media experience, or even what is distributed from your pill.
We insist that you perform your own backups, which is easily done. We also need you to understand that each Red Pill, generates its own passwords for your storage. SohoStar stores only a few things: your Pill ID, a challenge password, your public encryption key, and with your permission, your last known IP address.
We need you to recognize that if you forget your password, or if a government entity asks us to break in to your Red Pill, we can’t help you. We can’t punish hate speech. We can’t see who your friends are. We have no way to “break in” or backdoor into your device. We can’t censor anyone. If you “Brick” your device, we can’t bring it back to life, hence the insistence on doing backups. Because The Red Pill generates its own passwords for storage, and access, we can’t even crack contents stored on the chips.
We assume that lots of people are going to insist we assist in access, so we created the contract as a condition of purchase. In essence, what you do with it, We can’t tell, but we also aren’t party to it
What about Bad Guys using The Red Pill?
The Red Pill does nothing more than is already available. For example, NordVPN allows direct highly secure communications. There are numerous, easily implemented open source programs that provide totally secure communications. Windows provides Ipsec and PPTP but no one thinks that it allows bad guys protection, although it does.
The real issue is that unless you have security, ALL of your information is available to bad guys. They know where your kids go to school when you reveal your location on FB, and post pictures of the “school concert”. Not a good idea. You’re giving away pictures of victims, where to find them, and who you and they associate with.
So the idea that having a device, like The Red Pill with encryption should be stopped because there will be bad guys who will use it is misguided – they’ll use some other existing mechanism, and you will have no protection. IF the good guys could see what the bad guys are doing now without The Red Pill, then they are either allowing it, or they’re currently not able to see bad guy information. The only thing not hidden is your unencrypted life, and what school to find victims.
THINK!! if you were going to do something really really bad, would you really do it in plain view where it would take seconds to track your actions? No. the bad guys don’t need The Red Pill, they’re already hiding their tracks, but YOU DO need it to protect your home and family from bad guys and hackers.
Do all my friends need to have a Red Pill?
Yes and No. The Red Pill has 3 modes, Plain text (unencrypted), VPN encryption, and encrypted pill-to-pill. The Plain text mode is how most emails and websites are sent on the web. TLS is a format for encrypted access to mail servers, which The Red Pill supports. Without TLS, someone monitoring can see the content of the email. VPN mode uses standard protocols that are used for VPN (openvpn, IPsec, and PPtP). The Red Pill can connect using these VPN protocols to non-pill systems. Pill-to-pill traffic is always encrypted and can not connect to non-pill systems.
Your Pill can send and receive mail, texts, and messages to any system with an open interface (meaning NOT a pill). The Red Pill “speaks” standard protocols to other servers in the Internet. At home (or business) your browser is used to connect to The Red Pill directly and view your posts, email, and messages through the Fifth application.
The most special services that make The Red Pill unique are really for Pill-to-Pill activities
What is Fifth?
Fifth is The Red Pill’s social media and unified messaging application. Just as you log into Facebook, you enter your account and password when you bring up the Red Pill in your browser.
Fifth has a look and feel of Facebook, where you can manage contacts / friends, you group them by how much you trust them, and by what context you know them (work, church, clubs, neighbors, etc). From your “home” page, you can access all of your messages, news, and social posts.
Fifth uses technology called Unified Messaging, whether you are using a mail manager like Thunderbird, or Outlook or your Fifth home page, when a message is deleted it is removed from The Red Pill, regardless of how it was deleted. Fifth is a full communication platform which allows you to send or receive posts, email, video mail, voice mail, and nearly any other type of media.
Fifth allow controlled sharing of any content. There are three modes of sharing: public, public trust, and private. Public is a no protection distribution whether through email, or social media. There is no hope for privacy. Public-Trust is open distribution of content within your contacts. Private, attaches permissions to the Content. What you actually share or send to contacts on other pills, is only a permission link. The permission link requests the shared content by their pill, asking your pill. The Link is authorized only for the destination user. The access permissions follow content even when it has been transferred to another Pill.
There is another type of sharing of content and that is through publishing, where encrypted content can be freely shared, but only read by those with the proper key. This is part of the subscription news service.
Fifth normally assumes that for social media, you’d be connecting to another Pill, however SohoStar has 2 sites that are used for group (1 to many) distributions. For large distribution groups, SohoStar relies on a backbone hosted bulk distribution system. One of these sites allows non-pill users to access content.
SohoStar’s policy is to not store un-paid content on our network servers. In the case of social media streaming to non-pill users, only content that occurs while being connected is streamed to those logged in. In the case of Pill owners, the content is stored on each person’s pill.