ElbaElba — private, single-file encryption for one folder on your computer

It's called Elba so the name can do some of the heavy lifting.

Elba is a fence around files on your computer. What's inside the fence is truly yours — yours in the way you thought the rest of your computer was, until you realized it's either water or the mainland, but never exclusively yours. Elba is a sovereign space. Encrypted at rest, visible only on your say-so.

It doesn't install. It sets up camp. So you can copy it, keep it in several places at once, email a copy to yourself — even store it in the Cloud. Safely, because what the Cloud is holding is sealed. They can store your island. They can't set foot on it.

The space outside the fence isn't hostile by definition. It's just not yours. The space inside isy design, and by definition. It never learned to be anything else. It's your place to think unsupervised and create uncopied. Write like nobody's watching. Store unmonitored. Private. Remember?

Not that your thoughts are dangerous, or terrible, or wrong. They're just yours. Not raw material to train an AI. Not a harvest for multinationals to build an algorithm in your image and sell it back to you. Companies that, hand over hand, are buying their way into the politics that govern you. You don't have to believe that ends badly to want no part in feeding it.

Elba is a place where privacy is the norm, not some reasonable alternative.

Is there a downside? Of course there is. Two, honestly. Elba works on every platform in exactly the same way, but it needs a Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave — to do its protective work. And if you lose your password, the island is gone. No reset, no recovery, no support line that can let you back in. That isn't a flaw we failed to fix. It's the proof there's no back door. The sovereignty is total, and so is your responsibility for it.

Other than that, it does what it says. Draw Elba around a perimeter on your computer and declare the field inside yours. Click, enter your password, and it opens. Work on the files — texts, drawings, projects, whatever's yours. Close it, and it's encrypted again. By default. Always.

Elba is not a rented space on your computer. Privacy is not a privilege you pay for in monthly installments, your own files held hostage for a fee. Buy it once and it's yours.

Elba is a paid package for its first three years, at a price that declines as it nears its freedom. After January 1st, 2030, it belongs to the Commons — open source, no longer ours to sell.

Everyone's. Yours.