Ghillie

a self-mutating claw that never edits itself — a private assistant that runs on your own computer

Ghillie can grow new abilities — and the growing is the safe part: he never edits himself. A new ability arrives as source with a mathematical proof, your machine re-derives the proof before anything installs, and what does not prove does not run. His capabilities rise; his authority never does.

Discretion

The discretion of a loyal secretary. He tells nobody anything. Your details leave your machine only under a rule you have set; every disclosure is written down, so you can see exactly what left and why; and your most sensitive details go to no one except by your own hand. These are not promises — the rules that make those decisions are proved, and you can check the proofs yourself.

Safety

No open ports, and no way in from the outside. Nothing he receives is run — deliveries land in quarantine as documents; there is no installer and no executor. The decisions that matter are each made by a rule proved correct for the inputs it is given, and you can re-check any proof on your own machine.

Quiet

He speaks only when there is news, and never at night — unless it is one of the few things you said was worth waking for.

Yours

You outrank him, always. He runs on your hardware, uses your models, and answers to no one else. Free, open source (AGPL-3.0).

The library

Ghillie comes with access to proved software. Members vote on what gets built next, and it is produced free for every member — or commission a piece just for yourself. Anyone can write an extension, and Ghillie cannot be subverted by one: a new extension can only advise or be refused — it can never make Ghillie act beyond what you have allowed, whoever wrote it. You are not a customer here: you are one of the people deciding what exists. Two honest conditions on every piece: the build has to succeed — the proof either discharges or nothing ships — and it has to be legal. We refuse the unlawful in character, and we mean it.

Membership

A member is anyone running a Ghillie who has registered it with their email. That is the whole test. There is no fee, no tier, and no subscription.

Members download everything in the commons library free — source, proof and truth table, re-derivable on your own machine. Commercial pieces can be bought if you want them; nothing requires it. Members steer what gets built next: when your ghillie records a gap — a rule it needed and did not have — that gap can become the factory's next job, and what the factory builds for the commons is free to every member.

Registration is an email and your ghillie's public key. We do not want, and do not take, anything else.

You do not do this by hand: your ghillie will enrol himself the first time you run him, once the members' door is open — that part is not live yet. Until then he browses the catalogue and installs abilities without telling us you exist. When registration does open, it will ask you before it sends anything. Registration gates the services — the library, the vote, the commons — and never the software. Ghillie himself is yours to download, run and read without telling us you exist.

The library is building

The first proved abilities are on the shelf already, and more are being forged — including from the gaps members' own ghillies record. Every piece arrives as source with its proof and installs only after your machine has re-derived it. What is there today is honest and small; what comes next, the members decide.

You do not need to trust us

Every ability Ghillie gains arrives as source with a mathematical proof of the rules it follows, and your own machine re-derives that proof before anything installs. What does not prove does not run. We are not asking you to believe a company; we are handing you the working and inviting you to check it. The tools to check are free, and checking takes about ten minutes.

And we will tell you plainly what is not proved: the proofs cover the decision rules — who may see what, what may leave, what a delivery must pass. They do not make the rest of the software magic. That honesty is the deal, and it is the whole deal.

What the server records

This site runs no scripts, sets no cookies, and carries no analytics — you can check that by reading the source, and we would rather you did. But the machine that hands you these pages keeps a short note of each request, and it would be a poor start to say nothing about it.

One line per page or file served: the time, a shortened form of your address, the method, the path you asked for, the status we returned, the size, the referrer if your browser sent one, and the user agent string. Beside those sit whatever ordinary protocol headers your browser or the network in front of us attached — cache validators, routing tags, a tracing header if your client chose to send one. No cookies, no authorization headers, no request bodies — those are stripped before the line is written, not after.

Your address is cut short at the moment of writing, not when someone comes to read it. IPv4 addresses lose their last part; IPv6 addresses keep only the first 48 bits. So what sits on the disk is 86.12.236.0, never the address that actually visited. That is enough to tell one network from another and to notice a machine hammering the place; it is not enough to identify you. The whole address is never held, so it cannot be handed over, compelled, or leaked.

The lines are kept for thirty days, then they roll off and are gone.

Why keep anything at all? Because we are about to tell people this exists, and we would like to know whether the abilities are downloaded and the proofs fetched. That is a real question, and this is the smallest way we could find to answer it — the least we could record and still learn anything. If you would rather not appear even as a truncated network, Tor and a VPN both work perfectly well here; nothing on this site depends on knowing where you are.

Get him

Causes and this week's attempt — have a say.

The plan: TheReefink →