ryanisnan

I made Media Den, a privacy-by-design iOS photo and video vault.

I launched in April, and I've been steadily updating it as time allows. Really happy with how far it's come. Here are the notable privacy-by-design features I've led with:

  - Bring-your-own-storage
  - End-to-end encrypted media (config stored encrypted in the secure enclave, cached data gets stored encrypted -- one exception is videos, which require on-disk passing to the native video player -- data gets stored on your cloud provider's system encrypted)
  - Multi-cloud replication (and promotion from a replica to a new primary)
  - Proximity-based no-internet local file sharing using ephemeral keys, with man-in-the-middle protection
  - All the other typical non-shady features of a good vault (metadata removal, PIN auto-lock, privacy blur on app-switching)
  - Zero telemetry, tracking, etc. There in fact no servers at all in the loop.

https://mediaden.ca

This is pretty nice. How often are your PRs held back by these checks failing?

Nice work.

Same, Firefox. Curious.

How does this differ from just, say, giving someone an HTML dump of a static site? I don't quite understand what this protocol offers.

How exactly is it peer-to-peer if it's essentially an offline, transfer via hardware?

As a former SAR technician, connectivity is a massive, massive game changer.

I'll bite, because this is HN and I think there's more space for genuine discussion here, not because I desire to be right.

First, addressing my first point about how this is "the modern equivalent of an ad hominem attack". The commenter is complaining as if Claude basically came up with this entire thing itself. Very very seldom is that actually how things get created, at least in my experience. Yes there's the potential for someone to say something stupid like "Claude, generate me a blog post about something", and Claude can do it. But that's such a weird way to relate to any content that was in-part authored by AI. That just isn't how virtually everyone I know is using the tools, so it's a disingenuous take.

Second, I find your dismissal of the aptness of using the phrase "ad hominem" attack reductive here because yes, AI is not a human, but two points here:

1) I'm going to give the true OP the benefit of the doubt, that they used AI as a tool for helping develop and hone their thoughts, and AI wasn't just set off in a black box

2) AI can produce novel ideas, and can produce the output of thought, even if it isn't producing it the same ways our brains think

That makes sense. Thanks for responding!

Someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned downgrade attacks. I presume if you wanted, on either the client or the server, you could disallow pure ML-KEM if you didn't trust it, preventing this vector.

I don't know much about the hardware space - what do you make of the author's post that there hasn't been an articulated need for pure PQ encryption, where the device couldn't afford ECC.

What a reductive take - attack the argument or move on.

Is that what he's trying to do? I am no cryptographer, but when I read his post, his arguments about ECC+PQ make intuitive sense.

I'm out of fresh tin-foil hats as well, but it would not surprise me in the least if any government was actively engaged in weakening security and privacy protections.

Literally look at what they are all doing in almost every sphere. The current political zeitgeist is all about automated surveillance everywhere. The motivations are worn on their sleeves.

The modern equivalent of an ad hominem attack. Do better.

What would you say about his critique that simply ditching double-encryption is a bad idea? That seems like a fair point embodying a belt and suspenders approach.

This is weird but, help me understand how this meaningfully impacts our exposure.

I'm authenticated to Claude, so they already have the whole attribution thing solved.

Spot on, in my experience.

That this got 4 comments in 24hrs on HN is telling, what is going on with Mozilla :(

Neat, how do you verify as a user that this lib or this source is in fact what's used in the app?

This post title misses the big point here, which is that the physical copy will not include a physical disk, only a digital download code.

This effectively eliminates buying and re-selling of the game.

This feels deeply problematic. I would much prefer, where asked via appropriate legal processes, Anthropic serve over user data to government officials, and potentially suspend access.

Interesting. Do you have a uniform data set? E.g. documents of a specific type that you know consistently have similar formats, or is this training something you need to do per-document?

How do you know where to slice an image? What if you slice an image mid-word?

Early Heroku was fabulous. Thank you for your effort!

Totally! I like the bit about writing for a colleague, because this gives you a much more relatable concept I think.

Julia is a fantastic writer herself. I've long followed her work, and always been impressed with how great she is at distilling information.

I like how it stacks the firewood.

> Will we be the poorer for that, or will we be safer? I think poorer, because I hate being told what technology I can and can't use, but I'm not certain.

I think this is bang on. The motives are kind of irrelevant, because now that the precedent has been set, I suspect they'll be much more likely to go here for future restrictions. It's very convenient (even if true) to just say "security reasons".

I think you're right - it's one of the reasons I prefer a mac as a dev platform.

Honestly, Kubernetes has no moat. Give me a better, more simple alternative any day.

That's strange. Even in my hobby-toy app, I have a TOS that I bump whenever the terms meaningfully change, and in my app, it forces a re-acceptance of the new terms before using the app again.

I hope you're right. I am not informed - is this typically how these decisions get challenged?

Good to know - I hadn't considered the proxy bit.

For me, right now, I think it's conceivably a security advantage if the source isn't public. I know security by obscurity isn't a strategy alone, but with an incredibly difficult surface area to attack, I think user's using the app are very well protected, except for against nation states.

I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee network access for any iOS app - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188