Prism: Create and explore personalized infographics of your SMS history | Hacker News Reader

Prism: Create and explore personalized infographics of your SMS history

prismviz.com

53 pointssiruva0744 comments

If there is anyone from Stripe here, this is certainly not a good payment experience: http://c.kristian.io/image/0g331z470L2g

There is no way for the user to verify that the payment details are indeed sent over HTTPS. I wouldn't want to enter my payment details in a form like that.

(I work at Stripe.)

Yeah, we require that people use SSL on the payment pages they serve.

... And yet, despite that, it's not quite a clear-cut situation. When you enter payment details on a site, checking for HTTPS in the address bar is just a heuristic -- you're (mostly reasonably) assuming that "the payment form is served over HTTPS" implies "payment details will be submitted over HTTPS". Browsers try to help here (with warnings for HTTPS -> HTTP form submission), but a poorly implemented site could easily leak information, and you couldn't tell in advance unless you audited all the HTML and JavaScript.

The Stripe Checkout -- which prismviz is using -- always submits details over SSL (of course), but we additionally require websites to serve the enclosing page over SSL because it's both more secure and what users expect.

We rolled out some code recently to more effectively prod users that aren't using SSL in production to implement it. This helps a bit, but it'll always be possible for a weekend project to go live without having crossed every t. Either way, people tend to do the right thing here pretty quickly, since -- as this thread shows -- users complain if they don't.

> but we additionally require websites to serve the enclosing page over SSL because it's both more secure and what users expect.

Curious - what makes it more secure if it does and less secure if doesn't?

In theory, someone could have MITM'd the page and replaced the site's publishable key with their own.

Or they could have replaced the entire Stripe JS with custom JS that presents a similar-looking dialog that submits the CC data to a third party (possibly also submitting it to Stripe to avoid detection).

I think the website owner is supposed to put the page the payment form is on on a HTTPS site.

Hey yeah so that's the default out-of-the-box Stripe payment solution. Wish I had more time to setup something more familiar like paypal. But got rejected from app store a few days ago and wanted to release this weekend.

also, not sure how I feel about charging for this in general. Figured I'd try as that was the original app store plan. Here's a free link for HN types though: prismviz.com/download/hackernews

I think it's more than fine to charge for your app - the price is also very affordable ;)

Another example of how metadata alone can be used to paint a fairly complete picture of one's life.

Hey, nice job. A few things:

1) When I first opened the app, my eyes were focused on the central area where the visualization would appear. So, I completely missed the "Working..." text at the bottom[1] and thought it was frozen for a second. I would suggest moving that higher up.

2) It doesn't work, at least not for me. I've opened and quit it multiple times, waited for stretches of fifteen minutes, etc. Nothing. And I have less than 1,500 messages - I've had this iPhone for exactly a week.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/OrDTD0G.png

Edit: I'm not sure if it matters, but I'm running the iOS 7 beta and the OS X 10.9 beta.

I'm getting this too. Nothing showing up.

sorry to hear its crashing on you. I'm more of a webapp guy so haven't had a lot of success debugging my way through apple's objective-c libraries yet. In general, the backwards compatibility of the 10.8 sdk is pretty unreliable so it definitely works best if you're on mountain lion.

Imagine if this was actually created by the NSA (I mean, naming it Prism seems too obvious to be true), and we're all just falling into it's aesthetically-pleasing honeytrap.

Or suppose the company that built it were party to a data-sharing arrangement for the purposes of marketing. This is a weakness of SaaS in general. I remember not too long ago when ZoneAlarm would ask me if I wanted application X to access the internet, usually I'd think "WTF for?" or "I'll update manually, TYVM."

Do you have a way to download my entire iMessage history including content? I don't care about who I chatted with (I already know the answer to that) but what I would like is a text-format archive of the content of all the texts, for sentimental reasons. My own texts, so no privacy issue here. That would be a really great app in fact, if you are open to pivoting...

Also does this work in cases where the backups have been pretty spotty?

I just played around with this for similar reasons: http://www.wideanglesoftware.com/touchcopy

Didn't finish up the export because I didn't feel like paying just yet, but getting to that point was pretty easy. $30.

Might be better/cheaper versions out there, I didn't look around for that long.

There are several desktop applications for this. I like PhoneView for its other features, but you can dump full conversation history as text or cvs or PDF too:

http://ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/

Great app, however a big bug that breaks visualisation for me in the UK is that messages from 07123123123 and +447123123123 appear as separate contacts (i.e., one number has the contact name, the other shows as the number with the country code prefix), even though iOS treats them as the same.

I probably take a shortcut somewhere assuming "+1" country codes during contact merging... Will fix in future release!

Works great, thanks!

Have you thought about adding horizontal scale so you can see how many messages/day were sent? Or maybe a quick overview over how many messages/contact were sent in total.

This looks awesome. Does Android offer access to text messages the way iOS does through iTunes?

Nope

They should make one for Whatsapp. Who uses SMS these days? :)

Maybe I'm living under a rock (I don't, I live in SF), but I don't know anyone who uses Whatsapp in my two and a half years here.

iMessage, texts, facebook message, Wechat, but never a single Whatsapp user.

It's preferred over texting in almost every country I've visited, but it's never caught on in the US.

Most smartphone users in Singapore use WhatsApp for general texting too.

On the other hand, WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk seem to have rather limited audiences here. (Much of the LINE usage between myself and friends is sticker spam.)

chrischen: What do iOS and Android users in your circles use for free cross-platform texting?

Here in Japan it's hard to find anyone under 40 who doesn't use Line for nearly all their messages. The carriers make it extremely expensive for people to communicate with users on other networks so people just circumvent texting and calling with line. I've asked my friends why they use it and they all say because they like the stickers.The market was wide open for a while, it just took some good marketing.

Curious: They've stopped using "email"? I'm guessing LINE's becoming ubiquitous because of the free functions and the cute stickers.

For cross platform we just use Facebook message and SMS. I looked it up, and Whatsapp has very little market share in the US. In China it's pretty dominated by Wechat.

Everybody in latin america uses WhatsApp. It's a common saying to say, "whatsapp me", instead of inbox me these days.

I've never heard anyone say "inbox me." It's always "text me", "facebook message me", or "send me an email."

>'tsapp me

rolls off the tongue better for me...

Huge in Australia too, FWIW.

Ha! The case is entirely different here in Nigeria. I don't know anyone that does NOT use Whatapp. I have over 300 WhatsApp contacts.

Messaging apps have long been regional due to network effects. In Canada, my friends used MSN Messenger, in the US, AIM. In China, QQ/Wechat, in the US it's mostly been SMS/iMessage or Facebook messages. I've yet to locate a Whatsapp location, but I guess Nigeria is one.

Germany, too, as SMS flatrates got to the market rather late and there was some social networking confusion with the VZ group, slowing down the expansion/adoption of Facebook a bit.

In Australia, Whatsapp is very big within at least the Asian communities I've found

Very popular in EU

Everyone[0] uses Whatsapp in Europe.

[0]Source - me.

I live in Europe and have never heard of it. I'm guessing it's some kind of messaging app.

it does iMessage at least!

Hope to add android eventually

A few years ago, I discovered that iPhones backups are a bunch of sqlite databases (the SMS and call records are, anyway). Once I realized that, I became curious and started digging through old backups just to see what was there.

it's a very nice app!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com