apayan

Hi everyone. I wanted to start a company that builds privacy preserving/enhancing products+services. The first product was this location sharing service (scratching my own itch), and my friend said I should just put it out there to see if anybody is actually even interested in it. The code is AGPL [1], the crypto is based on libsodium and the mobile apps are all native.

I’d like to find a way to charge for this service so I can spend more time on it, and building other privacy preserving services, but I’m not sure of some things:

  * Is this a service you would use?
  * Would you pay for it?
  * Would you or your company sponsor it?

Happy to answer any questions you may have. Any feedback is appreciated.

P.S. I'm sure you may be wondering "where is the iOS app?". It's coming. Real soon. Now'ish. Later. It's currently undergoing a UI overhaul, and because all of the people I share with are Android users, it hasn't been as high of a priority.

[1] https://github.com/zood

moxie, I want to thank you and the entire team at Signal for all that you're doing to further e2e crypto and making mass surveillance more difficult for nefarious actors around the world. You're making everyone's communications safer.

> but they chose to fork WebKit into Blink, in part _because_ they didn’t want to share the work they were doing

I believe that statement is false. As I understand it, from @tomalsky, Google simply had a different (superior) design for making WebKit multi-process, and Apple did NOT want to take those changes upstream into WebKit. So if Google wanted to use the better design, they had to fork.

You might want to try the Dell XPS 9380 Developer Edition that comes pre-loaded and configured with Ubuntu 18.04. I switched to it from a 2015 mac laptop I had been using. Set up was pretty easy and everything just worked out of the box. It's also nice that the performance per dollar ratio is better than a new macbook pro.

My only complaint is that the trackpad is a little small for my hands, but the sturdy keyboard with real function keys more than makes up for it.

Despite being a big fan of copyleft, the "source available" license sounds like the right direction for Zood. Thanks for that link. I had not heard about Commons Clause or Mega Limited Code Review. I'll dig into it those.

The biggest difference is that Zood uses end-to-end encryption, meaning I (as the service operator) can't see your location. Your location is encrypted before it ever leaves your phone, and the only person that can decrypt it, is the person with which you are sharing. More info on the second half of the page here:

https://www.zood.xyz/products/location

Fair question. As of this writing, there isn't anything to trust me short of sniffing all the packets coming out of the phone and/or decompiling the APK.

While in beta, I'm not charging, but in order to align my interests with those of users I will be charging for it once I'm done beta testing. So far I've only been testing with family and close friends.

The app isn't currently open source, but I want to find a license model that will let folks see the source code while still preventing someone from forking it and running their own instance of my company. As you noted, this needs to be a sustainable endeavor, and I think that would be unlikely if I just release it all under MIT or BSD-3

It's too early for an audit (and I don't have the money for one yet), but I'm using libsodium for the crypto so there's no need to worry about me writing my own bad crypto primitves.

The website is sparse, because the current audience for it is my family and friends who I've contacted about helping me with the beta testing. I intend to flesh out the site a lot more before I come out of beta.

Shameless plug: I've built a family location sharing app that uses end-to-end encryption, so you don't have to worry about this sort of data leak (or any other). It's available for iOS and Android. (It's in beta, but quite functional).

https://www.zood.xyz

That's a curious situation. I run my 4k displays over DisplayPort with an RX 580 on Ubuntu 18.04. However, I haven't gone out of my way to obtain drivers from AMD. I'm just using the drivers that ship with the kernel. It might be worth trying a vanilla installation of Ubuntu to see if you can get your set up working.

Hi Henrique and Pedro. Great service idea. I love the write up.

I just signed up and after clicking the activation link in the email, I started the application. When it go to the step asking about my bank, I said it wasn't listed and then I typed in my bank name. Now I'm sitting at the final page with the 'Submit Application' button, but it's grayed out. I'm using Firefox Nightly on Ubuntu.

The rest of the flow was pretty easy though. Nice job.

EDIT: Larissa was able to help me via the intercom chat. Great support integration!

I found this odd too, so I was skeptical of the claim, but I found this sentence on the home page[1] that mentions Apple as a founding member:

> Founding members are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix and NVIDIA.

A similar sentence exists on AOM's about page[2].

[1]: http://aomedia.org/ [2]: http://aomedia.org/about-us/

I don't know about other states, but in California if you sue a corporation in small claims court, they can NOT send an attorney:

Corporation or other legal entity — A corporation or other legal entity (that is not a natural person) can be represented by a regular employee, an officer, or a director; a partnership can be represented by a partner or regular employee of the partnership. The representative may not be an attorney or person whose only job is to represent the party in small claims court. An attorney may appear to represent a law firms as long as that attorney is a general partner of the law firm or is an officer of the corporation. However, in both instances, all the other members of the partnership and all the other officers of the corporations have to be attorneys as well.[1]

[1] http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/small_claims/basic_info.s...

For those that are unfamiliar, when a faculty member wins a grant the university takes 50%+ for themselves. Right off the top. So if you are awarded a grant for $100k from DARPA, NIH or some other granting organization you'll only end up having ~$47k to spend. The rest goes straight to the pocket of the university.

From an economics point of view, we should allow the free movement of labor (people) because we already allow the free movement of capital (money) across borders. If my understanding is correct, this is one of the pillars of the European Union.

However, I think looking at it as a basic human right is more appropriate. Restricting people crossing borders is simply institutional racism. Countries are granting permission to enter/not enter based on the person's race. If this were any other context, people would be screaming racism. But because it's become so typical over the past 150 years, nobody calls it for what it is anymore.

Appirater

Description: A library for your iOS app that gently reminds your best users to review the app. The project has over 4000 stars on GitHub and is widely used in lots of popular apps, however, I don't have much time to devote to maintenance/improvement.

It's a small library, so it's easy to jump into. The functionality is limited (but very useful), so there's not a lot of need for constant changes to it either.

What to do this month: Fix compiler warnings brought on by the release of Xcode 8.

Skills: Objective-C

GitHub: https://github.com/arashpayan/appirater/issues/242

How to help: Send me (Arash) an email (arash -at- ara.sh) and let me know you want to help out. I'm looking for a long term maintainer for the project, so if you can provide a couple good pull requests, I'd be happy to give commit access.

License: MIT/X11

Thanks for your consideration. :-)

andlabs (Pietro) is writing this library in C as a support for the Go ui library he's been building. https://github.com/andlabs/ui

However, as others have pointed out, this will be very useful for many other languages as well. I would love to see a Renaissance of native cross platform apps.

Interesting. I was unaware that Xamarin maps widgets like that. Thanks for enlightening me. :-)

How does it abstract away the more fundamental differences between platforms Activities/Fragments vs. UIViewControllers?

tl;dr. The success of Unity can't be used as an indicator that cross-platform frameworks are good for productivity/utility apps.

Xamarin and Unity don't have anything in common, other than the fact that Unity uses C# for scripting (on an ancient runtime).

Cross-platform app development frameworks are generally awful because they don't tightly integrate with the native look and feel of every platform. Video games don't even try to achieve native looks on any platforms. They're always full screen works of art, without any hint of a UIButton (iOS) or TextView (Android).

Google purchased Motorola for the patents as a defensive measure, so they ward of suits from Apple, MS and Intellectual Ventures. Google has NEVER sued another company over patents. Examine the timeline of patent suits on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars

It's all Apple and Microsoft, and then Samsung started firing shots at Apple in retaliation. Google has never gone offensive with a patent suit.

This is still the initial draft of the law, and it's common for laws to get marked up with changes that benefit those in power.

iOS 4.2 was delayed to the point of never being released. Apple went straight to 4.2.1 instead.

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2010/11/developer-reports-major-v...

Source: I found/reported the bug mentioned in the article.

Apple also said they would make FaceTime an open and interoperable protocol "later this year". So being sceptical of Apple's promises of openness are justified.

If Mozilla creates their own distribution of Android and sells phones with it, then they're extremely relevant in the mobile space. Take a look at the principles of the Mozilla manifesto[1]. Nowhere does it say, 'we need to have a relevant web browser'. It's a bigger mission about an open internet, unrestrained communication, libre software and ultimately end-user sovereignty. When Mozilla.org was created, the best way to achieve those goals was by having an awesome libre browser. As you rightly point out, the world has gone mobile, and the way for Mozilla to continue their mission is by releasing a mobile OS built with their principals in mind. If this was 2007, building Firefox OS may have been a viable strategy. But it's 2015, and the quickest, and in my opinion the only, way to succeed is with a distribution of Android with Mozilla services.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

This is a welcome change from Mozilla, but I think they should take it a step further and ditch Firefox OS completely. The original reason d'etre of Firefox OS was that it would run on lower spec'ed and cheaper hardware than Android could, but that's not an efficient use of their limited resources for a couple reasons: 1) Mozilla could contribute to Android to improve it's performance on cheaper hardware. 2) Moore's law is making powerful hardware more affordable for the world's poorest people, faster than Mozilla can get Firefox OS and an attractive app ecosystem off the ground.

Mozilla should instead focus on freeing Android from it's dependency on Google. Everyday, apps become more and more dependent on Google Play services, the proprietary set of libraries that Google controls on Android devices. Developers need an open version of Google Play Services (Mozilla Mobile Services?) and even a competitive app store (10% commission instead of 30%?). The natural next step would be to create their own distribution of Android and release it on quality hardware. Not only would they be furthering the cause of free software and open computing, but they would have a revenue stream to continue their mission.

I think you and Lawtonfogle are in agreement. For example, anonymity on the internet is illegal (or very close to it) in China, and Tor is meant to circumvent that law. Thus, it was designed for an illegal purpose as far as the Chinese government sees it.

You might enjoy using CyanogenMod on your phone. No google account required, and it gives you a lot more control over Android.

So then we can be pretty sure Apple won't be releasing a laptop/desktop computer with a touch screen?

Thanks for your reply kephra! That's good info to know.

Can you go a little more in depth about the maintenance contracts you have with customers? Does that mean they get a fixed number of hours of your time every month? What if they go over that time? Does it mean being on call? Thanks.

tldr; this was fixed. It just didn't get marked as fixed by Google.

I was following this issue on the Nexus 4 (comment #20 of OP[1]), way back when and even filed a more detailed follow up issue [2].

In short, the APIs needed for echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain adjustment weren't making use of the Nexus 4 hardware (lack of driver, missing code, I don't know why). However, the issue was fixed in the Android 4.3 OTA update.

I can verify this because at the time I was working on a VoIP app and my Nexus 4 was my primary phone and it was driving me mad. But in all fairness, it was fixed by Google.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41626#c20

[2] https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=42978