Guides/Sovereignty
Sovereign computing tools: owning a room in your own machine
Sovereign computing tools are programs that run on your device, hold no data of yours anywhere else, and can be read, copied, and kept by you indefinitely. They are the opposite of tenant software — you are not renting a room, you own it.
The three tests
A sovereign tool passes three tests: it works fully offline, its source is inspectable, and it will keep working if the maker disappears. Elba passes all three.
Why the category matters now
The default is drift toward tenancy: your writing lives in someone's doc, your notes in someone's app, your photos in someone's cloud. Sovereign tools are the small counterweight — one folder at a time.
Questions people actually ask
- Is sovereign computing the same as self-hosting?
- Related but smaller. Self-hosting means running your own server; sovereignty can be as modest as a single local file.
- What other sovereign tools are worth knowing?
- Obsidian for notes, Syncthing for peer-to-peer sync, age or GPG for command-line encryption, and Elba for folder-level at-rest encryption.
Take the island
Elba is one HTML file. It runs locally in a Chromium browser, seals a folder with AES-256-GCM, never phones home, and becomes open source on 1 January 2030.
- €49MMXXVI· now ·
- €39MMXXVII2027
- €29MMXXVIII2028
- €19MMXXIX2029
- FreeMMXXX2030
the price falls each year · free to all 1 jan 2030
pay once · no account · nothing leavesRelated guides
- Digital self-defence tools: a short, practical shelf
Small tools that raise the cost of surveillance without changing your life. A practical shelf, with Elba as the local-encryption piece.
- What is mortalware? Software that dies into the commons
Mortalware is software with a release date — a scheduled transition from paid to free-and-open. Elba's mortalware plan explained.
- Zero-knowledge encryption, explained without jargon
Zero-knowledge means the service can't read your files even if it wanted to. Here's the idea, and how Elba goes one further.