Celebrities fronting startups again? Now we're interested!

In who’s behind the startup and who it’s linked to

Move over Stephen Fry: a retired Australian rules footballer, motivational speaker and reality television contestant is fronting a startup.

As pitched by the Australian Financial Review, Jason Akermanis (a famous-in-half-of-Australia athlete and Celebrity Apprentice contestant ) has become the face of “unbreakable” crypto company Splitlock.

Splitlock takes a chunk of data, breaks it into two pieces, hashes each piece, and stores them separately. In theory, this should mean that the data can't be recovered except by the person holding the original password. The patent for Splitlock's technology was filed by Andrew Tune.

Well-known Johns Hopkins University cryptography expert Professor Matt Green told The Register Splitlock's idea employs a well-known principle for data protection. It can be challenging to implement, but having worked on such systems himself, Green told us they can be made to work well, if implementation errors don't undermine the system's security.