Bring the Noise!

NSL community mission to pressure test the mixnet with NymVPN

Author: Nym

October 15, 20245 mins read

NSL community mission to pressure test the mixnet with NymVPN

Have you ever just wanted to try to break something? Well that’s what Nym needs all your help to do: break the Nym mixnet!

Ok, not exactly break it: but push it to it’s breaking point, force DNS leaks from every hidden hole, crash the nodes that aren’t up to scratch, flood the Nym customer service channels and devs with so many error reports that heads spin and knees buckle under the weight.

How can we do this? Use and test it on a mass scale.

This is the core mission of the Nym Squad League Fall Season: flood the mixnet with as much traffic as possible through the NymVPN Anonymous Mode so that a bigger and better app can emerge from all the stress.

Unfortunately you won’t get rewarded for breaking specific things — after all, your traffic can’t be linked to you! But you can get rewarded in NYM for your individual and collective contributions. See below for all the details about how to be a part of Nym’s most important NSL mission to date.

The Bring the Noise! mission will run from 14 October to 31 December 2024, so start making your noise today!

Nym noise makers united

The upcoming NymVPN launch will certainly make some noise across the world this season, so join us in the cacophony.

The Nym mixnet generates noise: these are network techniques designed to confuse surveillance efforts and increase the anonymity of everyone using the network.

One type of noise is cover traffic which increases the volume of traffic flowing through the network to make user traffic patterns hard to ascertain. This “dummy” traffic is composed of Sphinx data packets that look exactly like real packets but are in fact empty. Other types of noise include data mixing and timing obfuscation which cloak your online traffic patterns like no other technology can.

Everytime you send your traffic through the mixnet via the NymVPN Anonymous Mode, you will be making the whole network noisier and thus more private and resilient for every Nym user. The bigger the crowd, the harder tracking anyone will be! That’s where the Nym community comes in for one of the most important NSL missions to date: let’s increase the size of the mixnet crowd.

What to do

First, make sure to get the latest version of NymVPN on your device(s).

The goal is simple: use the NymVPN Anonymous Mode as much as possible this season and contribute to a massive collective stress test of the network.

Mission reports

To be eligible for rewards, users are required to share submissions/reports. These reports will serve as your “proof-of-work” for earning rewards.

To submit your report:

Visit the NSL’s Submissions category on the forum
Click on the “Create new topic” button
Select the “making-noise” mission tag in the optional tags section and post your report

What to include in your report

Keep in mind, 00:01:43 isn’t going to win much, so see how far it can go with all kinds of traffic: email, messaging, browsing — try, it works!

Share screenshots of your connection time from the NymVPN home screen
Tweet * the picture to @nymproject with the hashtags #NYM #Privacy #CoverTraffic
Share your posts on Nym Discord & Telegram chats
Compile links to your posts on the forum with the tag “making-noise” every month to claim your points

*The Twitter/X account that you tweet from must have at least 100 followers

Want to go the extra mile?

In addition, don’t forget to report errors, connection problems, down entry and exit gateways, and user experience issues to the Nym Customer Service center.

Rewards

There are two types of rewards:

Claim up to 50 NSL points daily after submitting your monthly mission report
An additional 1000 $NYM will be rewarded monthly to one member who stays connected the longest! Simply submit a screenshot of your longest session

A noisy network for a private world

It’s not enough to design a great piece of technology: it also needs to be thoroughly tested out in the wild. With your help this season, NymVPN will be birthed into the world at the end of this year battle-tested and ready to deliver its promise: to bring true online privacy to all of humanity

Surveillance technologies will only become more and more efficient at tracking everything we do, finding signals in even complex networks. Help Nym make the mixnet so noisy that all our personally identifiable signals and patterns will simply be lost in the power of the crowd.

In the end, there isn’t a crowd without you.