Show HN: Anoncat, stay Anonymous while sharing and chatting | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Anoncat, stay Anonymous while sharing and chatting

anoncat.com

25 pointstermos28 comments

Um, need more info?

Anonymous but not over https? Yes, you said you're gonna add it at some point, but it doesn't inspire much confidence. You should start with that.

Also, architecture? The about section doesn't say much. And you store messages(but not IPs) to what end?

Thanks for the feedback! The reason messages are stored is to broadcast the newest messages to a user on join

Ok. Good luck with your project, but since that's generally regarded as a huge undertaking, my advice would be to more precise on your definitions and try to explain the architecture, the tradeoffs and the expectations one might have from your service.

Other people I'm sure are letting you know as well, but it's returning a 502 now from all the HN traffic and it doesn't look like there's a cached copy anywhere

I took it offline, had too much load after several DOS attacks. Rate limiting is now in place (like it should be from the beginning) and the site is back up!

I did: setInterval(function(){socket.join("rooms:" + 'hn', {}, function(chan) {chan.send("new:message", {content: 'message from a BOT', nick: 'nick', chan: 'hn'})});}, 10);

There is obiously some security problems. ;)

My friend did the same, really took its toll on the servers and I was forced to take them offline. Rate limiting is now implemented, thanks for pointing this out!

Anonymous over HTTP - is that a joke?

I think the name, anoncat, is very clever. Maybe I'm predisposed for cat-like-things. But anyway the application is very clever too.

How come you store the chat messages?

Then you'll love https://crypto.cat/

Needs an https endpoint :)

Good point, it's on my list somewhere :)

No offense, but you do understand that by using the term "anonymous" you're misleading people, right?

If it's "on your list somewhere", then change the name or put a huge disclaimer that says "it's not really anonymoys and it's a toy project".

You really have to describe the guarantees(if any) and what you mean by "anonymous". Anonymous as in "your mother won't know it's you"? Or anonymous in the sense of the post-snowden era?

e.g. can a whistleblower use this?

He can use Cloudflare for now. Free plan has HTTPS too.

Nothing says anonymity like a global CDN that "infected" an incredible of websites. No thanks! Keep it local on your server please.

Link?

Link to what? https://www.cloudflare.com ?

To aw3c2's claim that cloudflare is "a global CDN that "infected" an incredible of websites"

Is that why I have been seeing a Cloudflare redirect message at most sites I've visted this week?

The captcha one? As a Tor user for casual browsing it is really a slap in the face to see that on websites I considered supportive of privacy.

Nice UI.

Is the code available? How does it compare to https://crypto.cat/ ?

Code will be released at some point when I'm no longer embarrassed over it. I bet it's not something anyone should look on for learning Elixir best practices

Looks nice!

I see you allow file uploads. How do you handle file storage, isn't that potentially expensive (DOSing your bank account)? And what about legal problems (copyright infringement and illegal stuff)?

I don't have much disk space available so if the limit is exceeded I will delete files that have not been downloaded recently. Active files stay longer. Legal problems I have not put much thought into, but anything reported or found by me will be deleted immediately. Client side encryption and decryption could come in the future.

I can't figure out how to chat. Enter isn't working to send messages. Also, is there a way to set nicks, like in IRC?

Are you using Swype keyboard or some exotic keyboard? The return key on those keyboard have a strange behaviour that I will debug some day. No way to set nick, they are randomly generated for each browser.

It's down now, presumably from the message spam.

aaaand its dead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com