Hotspots for Obama (or Romney) | Hacker News Reader

Hotspots for Obama (or Romney)

hotspotsforobama.com

61 pointsOJKoukaz49 comments

I like HackerNews to be a supportive environment for startups, but this raises some questions.

Publishers trying to make an honest buck will dislike this. So will cafe customers that just want coffee and wifi and not your political positions, and the privacy conscious who now have their browsing data being sent off to an anonymous third party.

And that's putting the security question aside. (If these guys got hacked, they could very easily harvest your bank and email passwords; I'd be more trusting if they're weren't also using an anonymous whois proxy.)

The best businesses find win-wins (Airbnb is good for travelers and real-estate owners) -- but I only see one win here.

Edit: If this company ends up expanding available public wifi hotspots by rewriting some ads and providing some revenue back to the wifi provider, that could be a win-win for customers and cafes and could be a real hit.

> Publishers trying to make an honest buck will dislike this.

Publishers most likely won't know this is happening.

> Cafe customers that just want coffee and wifi and not your political convictions will dislike this.

It is up to the cafe owner whether they want to do this, or whether they want to put a political sign on their windows for that matter.

> The privacy conscious who now have their browsing data being sent off to an anonymous third party will dislike this.

All advertising networks sends browsing data to third parties. Whether it is this one or some other one doesn't seem that big a deal.

>It is up to the cafe owner whether they want to do this, or whether they want to put a political sign on their windows for that matter.

His point wasn't about whether or not the owners could or could not support a candidate, it was whether or not they should support a candidate.

You're absolutely right, it is up to the owners. And this seems to be pretty cool. But most coffee shop owners (which seems to be the target) will not want to alienate part of their already small group of customers.

This may come off as a joke, but dead serious:

It seems you have never gone to get coffee in San Francisco.

Well there are always going to be exceptions to the case. I would also assume there are a greater number of people going to coffee shops in San Fransisco than there are in other cities.

If these guys got hacked, they could very easily harvest your bank and email passwords.

I don't think so, because secure sites will use SSL, and your browser does certificate verification.

Sometimes yes, HSTS sites would be harder to crack.

However, many people still manually enter website urls (citibank.com) which redirects to https. If the DNS points citibank.com to a fake citibank phishing site, they simply wouldn't redirect to an https site at all.

Very savvy customers may notice that they aren't connected vis https; most people wouldn't.

Couldn't the argument be made that Airbnb is bad for hotels and landlords though? If it's my wireless network, shouldn't I have the right to dictate what gets broadcast on it? You don't have to connect to it.

I'm not going to pass judgment on the ethics or usefulness of this app, so I thought I would try some constructive criticism.

1. The top-right page curl to switch between Romney and Obama has mismatched alt-text.

2. Instead of being partisan, maybe you would want a "HotspotsForAmerica" that would just remind people to vote for the candidate of their choice, instead of telling people who they should vote for.

>I'm not going to pass judgment on the ethics or usefulness of this app... >2. Instead of being partisan, maybe you would want a >"HotspotsForAmerica" that would just remind people to vote >for the candidate of their choice, instead of telling people >who they should vote for.

I'm not going to criticize this comment but ...

I was contrasting my feedback with the "this is a horrible thing to do" comments that popped up before mine. But, yeah, point taken.

This is the tackiest possible way to do this (who hasn't already seen every political ad 50 times?), not to mention the extreme inpropriety of asking for a user's router password.

Far easier, and more tasteful: rename your SSID. It's the digital equivalent of a sign on your lawn.

How does this work? They have an android app. I guess that connects to your router to change your DNS. (which then resolves their IP for some ad hosts). But how does it set their DNS in your router? Is there a standard API for that? Or did they make a scraper-app for lots of routers?

Deleted comment

I get that: My question is how they control the router.

Why is everybody expending so much effort to support the Obama+Romney campaign? Isn't it pretty clear that they're going to win?

The "they're identical" meme flies in the face of reality. Compare Antonin Scalia with Sonya Sotomayor and tell me Obama and Romney don't have significant differences that'll affect the country as a whole.

I often hear people use this argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Won't the Justices just wait until a President of their preferred ideology is in power before retiring?

Justice Ginsburg is only 79 -- both John Paul Stevens and Oliver Wendell Holmes retired when they were 90.

Edit: It looks like Ginsburg has expressed her desire to retire at 82 (in 2015), so unless she changes her mind, it will matter.

Ginsburg was treated for pancreatic cancer three years ago.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/st...

> Won't the Justices just wait until a President of their preferred ideology is in power before retiring?

For the 70+ year olds on the court, that's not always up to them. If it was, the ideological makeup of the court would essentially never change.

Or Keynes and Hayek.

Romney, it bears repeating, has an utterly conventional and mainstream take on economics. This isn't Keynes versus Hayek (or Minsky or Marx or etc.), here. It's Keynesian with one set of tuned parameters versus Keynesian with some slightly differently tuned parameters.

Romney would support having marginally more money in angel investors' pockets and making marginally less government-directed investments, e.g. Solyndra. So there's a minor Hayek vs. Keynes theme in the election.

Romney would also be pushing more stimulus via deficit-funded tax cuts, thereby increasing aggregate demand. So you could just as well say that Romney is the Keynes-side in this election, especially since the politics would be much more favorable toward Romney pushing stimulus than Obama.

In practice, you've got to look at what model of the world is motivating candidates and their economic advisers. In both cases, Keynes is whom they turn to.

His running mate was a self-identified libertarian... until he became the running mate, that is, and started fighting to be the one to pump the most money into Medicare.

Did I say they are identical? Of course they aren't. But one has to be quite out of touch, immature, or just content with corruption to think that expressing a preference for one set of these lesser differences is worth supporting their overriding commonalities.

Or, instead of being "out of touch, immature, or just content with corruption", things like outlawing abortion, preventing same-sex marriage, and installing theocratic laws don't seem so "lesser" to me.

So you're still lacking perspective for whatever reason. Moralizing laws outweigh occupying other countries in a perpetual war machine while defrauding the plebs by debasing the currency? You're fighting for surface issues whose immediate importance is being constantly emphasized to deflect attention away from any problems that would actually require the establishment to change.

And your highlighted issues are certainly lesser than the associated meta issues that frame the debate, push government into more areas, and cause your issues to even be up for debate. The possibility of a theocratic law banning pornography wouldn't matter as much if Internet traffic weren't tapped and recorded in the first place.

This seems more like a play at the advertising revenue rather than an altruistic way to support Candidate A or B.

On first read I thought this implied it would add Obamads to my browsing experience, but looking more deeply, it just replaces other ads with Obama. Neat idea.

I would love for Barack to win, but this is just dirty. Who's going to pay for web advertising anymore if any malicious DNS in the middle just feels entitled to hijack them for its own purposes?

Who's going to pay for web advertising anymore if just anybody can install a browser extension able to block ads? We should boycott Firefox.

What kind of world is this where I can't fund companies by learning about the best kind of paper towels or being retargeted about a product I already bought?

I recently saw an interesting thought about the state of piracy, and it being a symptom of a flawed business model. What's to say advertising in its current state is the future of Internet business models?

If enough users don't want to see the current kind of ads, don't they become far less effective?

My issue with it is that it's silent. Unless there is some landing page that tells every new MAC address once "Listen, some content is being replaced", they are SILENTLY manipulating peoples' web traffic and presenting it as canonical. That rubs me the wrong way.

Ad providers already silently notice context and provide relevant ads (manipulating the eventual result of your page load). Isn't that just as creepy? (especially when it happens inside e.g. Gmail)

No, because in that case I am getting exactly what I expect. An ad from an ad network that the site I am visiting chose to use. That is not unexpected 3rd party manipulation.

Would you be okay with me going into coffee shops and running a NewsTweek node on their wifi that swapped out all the advertisements with ones that I could get paid for? Of course you would not, and not merely because I was not the operator of the hotspot.

The mere existence of a NewsTweek shows how you should really not have high expectations about traffic going over open wifi.

Do you honestly think changing advertisements is the worst case for a mitm device?

Do you honestly think I was suggesting that such a use is the worst case for a mitm device?......

Once again however, it seems we are in a situation where people on HN do not recognize that there are two distinct meanings of "expect" (for the remainder of this post, the second will be emphasized). Consider the following:

  A parent of a teenager in highschool finds their child watching
  TV instead of studying for an exam.  The parent shakes their head
  and says, *"I expect you will do well on that exam tomorrow!"*.
  They expect the child to do well on the exam, but they would be a
  fool to *expect* the child to do well on the exam.

A user of public wifi can expect their wifi traffic to not be tampered with, but they would be fools to expect that.

...Now, back to the actual point at hand, in reality, tampering with public wifi traffic, not merely logging/dissecting it, is fairly rare. There is no reason to fault non-technical users (the majority of society!) for having technically unfounded expectations. Their expectations may be foolish (in this case, there is little doubt of that), but that does not give technically inclined members of society a license to prey on them.

I wouldn't consider it a hijacking. You're opting in.

On behalf of everyone who uses your router which, depending on where your router is, might be rather a lot of people.

It's still your connection / property, so I don't see a problem with this.

Add Jill Stein please.

And given the political character of HN probably a lot of people here are voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate.

Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and vowed to stop the drone killings. The only reason not to vote for him is the whole "3rd party" thing (not that that will stop me).

Another reason could be those of us who support a national healthcare system (though I generally like Johnson's non-economic views).

Or because his economic positions would be bad news: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/the-presidential-ca...

Sure didn't stop me:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6t82lixl5mzhiea/IMAG0746.jpg

Although Jill Stein or Virgil Goode would also be acceptable alternatives to the parade of bozos the status quo puts in front of us.

Or, maybe, that Libertarians are as extreme as Communists in your books.

Is there a geolocation map of all of the hotspots that have supported either candidate? I would assume that would be more interesting than the configuration to a lot of people.

If you change your vote based on a hotspot name, I'd like to ask you not to vote.

Or drive or be around children for that matter - because you are dangerously ignorant.

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