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Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

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Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#11

Post by phaed »

dustball wrote: post #7
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #4

I don't know if I'd describe it as "TinyURL for your car", but after reading about what it does the description makes sense. It might be hard for people to initially "get" though. Where I see some future potential is in fleet management for smaller fleets (think your local plumber that has a couple of work vans, or maybe a small taxi company, etc). Being able to inexpensively monitor the locations of the vehicles, ho…

Thank you for your comments. Agree with everything you wrote. The words 'fleet management' may have bounced around in my head once or twice. Nod.

I still don't get it. TinyURL gets a url and makes it smaller, how is this TinyURL for your car?

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#12

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

phaed wrote: post #11
dustball wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your comments. Agree with everything you wrote. The words 'fleet management' may have bounced around in my head once or twice. Nod.

I still don't get it. TinyURL gets a url and makes it smaller, how is this TinyURL for your car?

TinyURL is a short URL that takes you to some piece of information on the web.

This is a short URL that takes you to information about your car.

I found the name confusing at first, but I can see the logic behind it.

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#14

Post by dustball »

phaed wrote: post #11
dustball wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your comments. Agree with everything you wrote. The words 'fleet management' may have bounced around in my head once or twice. Nod.

I still don't get it. TinyURL gets a url and makes it smaller, how is this TinyURL for your car?

I agree the connection is weak. The similarity is that both services provide a short URL for a resource. In the case of TinURL, it is a longer URL. In the case of gping.io, it is your vehicle.

Gimme a mulligan on the tagline and I promise to come up with something better :)

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#16

Post by michaelmior »

On a mostly unrelated note, does anyone know of a good carrier like RingPlus in Canada? Specifically something with no contract where I can opt to get only data in bite-sized increments? This seems like it would be great for projects like this.

Edit: Petro Canada seems to have something like this, but with a somewhat annoying expiration policy.

https://mobility.petro-canada.ca/plans.aspx

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#18

Post by btgeekboy »

I own a wifi-based OBDII adapter, but two things concern me about it that likely apply here as well.

1) It's always on, as the port is always powered, to my knowledge. I usually only drive on the weekends. Should I be unplugging it after each drive?

2) Security. The wifi adapter presents an open wireless network; I assume security on these bluetooth modules is also similarly lacking. What can an attacker do given the device's built-in capabilities, and what else can they do if they're able to compromise it?

To the author of this package though, it looks great. As others have mentioned, there's lots of room for growth here, and you've got the key data pipeline established.

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#19

Post by mschwaig »

wcarss wrote: post #2

There seem like so many ways to make this more secure than a public-but-hard-to-guess URL. Am I missing them? Does anyone have ideas on why it's a bad idea to for example require a login? Edit: just want to append that this is really neat! I don't think it's dumb at all but my knee-jerk reaction was "aaah somehow this will turn into someone hacking cars that aren't theirs"

Do you have a problem with this authentication method in general or for this use case?

Funnily enough a hard to guess URL can actually be perfectly secure. Google uses them quite a lot inside their services, facebook too I think.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/07/googles_ungue...

Re: Show HN: Gping.io – Like TinyURL for your car

#20

Post by turbohedgehog »

dustball wrote: post #7
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #4

I don't know if I'd describe it as "TinyURL for your car", but after reading about what it does the description makes sense. It might be hard for people to initially "get" though. Where I see some future potential is in fleet management for smaller fleets (think your local plumber that has a couple of work vans, or maybe a small taxi company, etc). Being able to inexpensively monitor the locations of the vehicles, ho…

Thank you for your comments. Agree with everything you wrote. The words 'fleet management' may have bounced around in my head once or twice. Nod.

Perhaps DOI for your car is a better analogy?

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

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