Show HN: SnpCht.com, a site that lets you secretly save your unread snapchats | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SnpCht.com, a site that lets you secretly save your unread snapchats

snpcht.com

44 pointskaushalp8848 comments

The problem with this service (or others like it) is the next eventual step is making your private snaps you've saved with the service public.

Snapchat itself faces the same problem. They are sitting the greatest trove of amateur porn ever, and eventually they need to figure out how to make money.

If you know everyone's social graph and you use sneaky ways of identifying people even when they are using different computers or using the private/incognito mode of browsers (which is definitely technologically possible) then perhaps it would be possible to serve up "private" erotic photographs only to a subset of users who are maximally disconnected from the people in the photographs.

I wonder how long you could get away with pulling off something like that if you were as sneaky as possible.

This website doesn't even pretend to have a privacy policy.

Also the greatest trove of child porn.

Based on the same premise that I would let someone secretly save my unread snail mail by giving them a key to my house.

Are you implying you lock your mailbox?

Mine is certainly locked. Many places in Britain also just have the letter box in the front door, which I assume the parent is referencing.

My (US) house has such a slot but it has been glued shut decades ago so that nobody drops dog poop, or worse, a flaming piece of mail, into it.

Strange country. Is never even thought of anybody doing that, and I've no reason to think that I would ever draw someone's ire who would do so.

Are you implying you lock your mailbox?

Would that be surprising to you? I assume you might be an American - I was really surprised when I visited the US and noticed that most people use unlocked boxes located outside of their houses to get their mail. Where I live people either lock their mailboxes or they get mail through a slot in their locked door - nobody leaves their mail accessible.

Mail slots are typically used in America in all row-homes (aka, very nearly all houses in towns or cities). Apartment buildings almost always have locked mailboxes, unless you are really scraping the bottom or your apartment is in a converted row-home (my old apartment had a single mail slot on the front door, the 3 different apartments just sorted each others mail). Private developments often have locked mailboxes outdoors by the entry gate.

Unlocked mailboxes outside the house really only exist in rural areas or regular suburbs (to be fair, these sort of homes probably make up a plurality of homes in America).

The bigger problem is what happens with packages. Unless you live in an apartment building with a staffed leasing/mail office, chances are your packages get left by the door (usually in plain site), or you need to be home to sign for them.

I am from Australia and where I'm from everybody leaves their mail in an unlocked box outside.

No idea how this works in other places, but in the USA, messing with someone's mail or mailbox is a federal crime.

It may be a crime, but an unlocked mailbox still leaves the temptation there.

Cool, so I suppose you don't use keys for your car neither. Convenient

First, stealing a car or stuff out of a car isn't a federal crime. Second, I almost never lock my car, but that depends on the neighborhood.

Well, in the US it's a substantial federal offense to steal mail or to read someone else's mail (coughunlessyouarethegovernmentcough), so that acts as a big deterrent, I think.

How many people are ever caught stealing mail though?

I'm not sure, but I'd assume that if you go around stealing packages, you're probably not doing it just because. You're doing it systematically for financial gain. In which case you have to be a repeat offender for it to make sense. In which case it's easier to track down. This happened near me last year:

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2011/12/20/two-arrested-for-theft...

Which a lot of people do. They give a trusted entity (a neighbor) their access token (keys) to check on and maintain their property while on vacation.

Except that you know where your neighbor lives and are able to find him in the event something goes wrong.

... I would never, ever do that.

A sibling, sure. But a neighbour? Hell no. If I haven't seen you get born, you sure are not getting unlimited access to where I live.

This seems sad to me. You don't have a single neighbor you'd trust with a key to your house?

Nope. I can't even trust them not to burn their apartment down. There is no way I would let them have access to mine. I don't even know most of them. That being said, I don't live somewhere where having a relation with your neighbours is common.

Why trust your family? As Biggie said-

  Number 3: never trust nobody
  Your moms'll set that ass up, properly gassed up
  Hoodied and masked up, shit, for that fast buck
  She be laying in the bushes to light that ass up

http://rapgenius.com/The-notorious-big-ten-crack-commandment...

To counter your Biggie lyric with a Kanye lyric:

See you're, unbreakable, unmistakable / Highly capable, lady that's makin loot / A livin legend too, just look at what heaven do / Send us an angel, and I thank you

http://rapgenius.com/Kanye-west-hey-mama-lyrics

Older siblings and parents are right out, huh?

... it was a figure of speech. I have actually never seen anyone get born. I was talking about the sibling-like relationship you can get with people that are close to you.

Sure, if one of my close friend is also my neighbour, I would let him take care of my house. But it would be on the basis of him being my friend, not my neighbour.

Sigh... I really wish I didn't have to restrict my self entirely to the use of phrases like "trusted entity" to avoid the excruciating minutia of debates like this.

You're poking a $4B bear, so prepare for the C&D.

I wouldn't trust a service like this, although I know many people will (or just won't think about that aspect). The main point I'm seeing from this is that it devalues the Snapchat service immensely. I know there are other services offering the same functionality as well. I'm sure it will be impossible for Snapchat to keep them out, and it could destroy Snapchat as they begin to catch on. I'm now less likely to send snaps as I know they can more easily be recorded forever.

I don't trust you. Please make this open source so I can host it myself. (or even better, a desktop application for other people as well).

If you don't, pretty sure somebody will do.

Read his comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6729362

He uses pysnap.

Friend of mine made a website like this that supports videos and pictures [1]. It's hard to trust something like that, but if you want you could always create your own implementation (see the About screen).

[1] http://expetelek.com/nolimit/

We support videos as well as pictures.

I wouldn't trust a random website with my login info

Not a secure connection either.

Would you trust snapchat?

More so than a random website not associated with it. They're going after an IPO at some stage so they need to be as legitimate as possible.

Snaphax, simple PHP class that connects and uses the Snapchat API - https://github.com/tlack/snaphax

Would assume snpcht.com uses it.

Actually we use this: https://github.com/martinp/pysnap

Thanks -

It's just the tokens and keys contained that really matter, I guess.

Curious: if you have unviewed snaps, backup your iPhone, view the snaps, then restore from backup - can you view again? (Assume 'airplane mode' off-network for any of the steps where it might help.)

Extremely unethical, the whole point of someone sending you a snapchat is that they don't want you to be able to save it (let alone save it on a third party server)

NSA saves it anyway :). I mean once your unencrypted bits hit the wire/waves, all these statements about who can(not) read/see/save/etc.. are just fog.

"Is the NSA storing nude pictures of kids? Are your children in danger? More at 11."

We may get meaningful regulation after all.

Show the sauce, luke?

Pretty neat.

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