Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking • Hacker News Board

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#41

Post by hackuser » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:24 AM UTC

enoch_r wrote: post #40

daviddahl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think the NSA is the 99% threat model. It is data miners who are building up dossiers on all of us to sell to the highest bidder which will raise costs for all of us in the long run. think Insurance companies raising rates on how often you visit the online whiskey store. We also released a password manager called Encryptr, but there is a larger project underway that I won;t say anything about yet as I am not i…

> I dont think the NSA is the 99% threat model. It is data miners who are building up dossiers on all of us to sell to the highest bidder which will raise costs for all of us in the long run. think Insurance companies raising rates on how often you visit the online whiskey store. If we banned life insurance companies from considering age or medical status, rates would not go down for everyone--they would go down for…

> they would raise costs for the risky and decrease costs for the less risky

That assumes their risk model is correct.

Regardless, I don't want all my behavior evaluated and judged. You may feel otherwise, but it should be my choice.

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#42

Post by daviddahl » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:39 AM UTC

level wrote: post #32

I'm not an encryption guy, so I'm probably totally off base, but how does this work in terms of decryption? When you 'friend' someone, are you sharing your decryption key with that person? That seems very vulnerable to mass data collection when you start emailing it around to friends. Does each friend get a different key that you can disable if you believe they've been mismanaging your key?

The way people "follow" you requires you to add them as a contact. Your contact card is basically a public key, but in a more human-understandable form.

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#43

Post by daviddahl » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:45 AM UTC

darkmighty wrote: post #29

daviddahl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes! that is a much better set of options. I will file an issue.

How are you doing fuzzy locations? You're probably not doing it this way, but note that just adding a random 4 mile radius vector to the users location in insecure (against multiple samplings), you need to quantize it to a fixed set like a 4 mile grid or something like that. I remember tinder made this mistake and you could locate users very precisely anonymously.

The dataset of all towns in the world with > 1000 inhabitants is bundled into Kloak. The GPS location was originally highly accurate, but we rounded down to 2 decimal places. So if your GPS coordinates match the center of the city (rounded down), a place name can be generated. It basically will place you near the center of the closest town, again, its naively rounded to 2 decimal places. I want to go back to make this code a bit more sophisticated, with more choices for the user.

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#44

Post by daviddahl » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:46 AM UTC

plesner wrote: post #38

Really like the idea. Unfortunately name might work against them in Scandinavia and other places where kloak means sewer (it has the same origin as "cloaca" in English).

That is an unfortunate naming problem. Kind of ironic as social media can be such a sewer!

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#45

Post by daviddahl » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:47 AM UTC

spiralpolitik wrote: post #37

Played around with it for 10-15 minutes. Looks like there are some good ideas in there but the UX on the iPhone version lacks polish. Not sure about the use of fixed width fonts. Will play around with it some more but it does look promising.

The source/tracker is here if you want to file issues, etc: https://github.com/Crypton/statusapp

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#46

Post by daviddahl » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:49 AM UTC

falien wrote: post #39

daviddahl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is fully open source from day one: https://github.com/Crypton/statusapp

This seems buried. Is there a reason it's not mentioned or linked on the kloak page? I actually went looking for the code and couldn't find that repository.

The link to the source code is in the about screen in the app. Hardly buried. I will have it added to the site, I was unaware of this.

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#47

Post by daviddahl » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 6:50 AM UTC

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #35

This is a cool idea but it'll be tough to get people to switch from FB and Twitter.

That is not the premise. The premise is that this is a parallel network for your trusted friends and family, off limits to the data-miners at FB and TWTR

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#48

Post by politician » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 7:00 AM UTC

I don't see how you can trust any of these sorts of privacy apps without compiling and side-loading them yourself. Even then, it's risky on a device you really don't control (f.e. Are we sure that the wi-fi radio that the FCC requires manufacturers to isolate from apps can't itself backdoor the device? Will we always be sure that the app developer won't ever update the software in a nefarious way?)

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#49

Post by jagermo » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 9:35 AM UTC

daviddahl wrote: post #14

Kloak's threat model is advertisers and data-miners. It is an experiment in private social networking. It is part of a set of new applications we are building at SpiderOak. Kloak is more or less a lab experiment in the UX of private systems.

If I may be so blunt - how are you planning on paying the bills for Kloak?

Don't get me wrong, it looks really, really interesting - but you still need money for it, where will it come from?

Re: Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

#50

Post by eps » Sat, Dec 12, 2015, 9:38 AM UTC

daviddahl wrote: post #47

free2rhyme214 wrote: post #35

This is a cool idea but it'll be tough to get people to switch from FB and Twitter.

That is not the premise. The premise is that this is a parallel network for your trusted friends and family, off limits to the data-miners at FB and TWTR

That's a good approach. And probably the only one. Just needs some form of vitality to help with spreading it, e.g. one-item sharing links/emails that double as invitations that auto-whitelist recipients as followers.