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Ask HN: Idea Sunday

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Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#561

Post by anonymousDan »

natdempk wrote: post #543
anonymousDan wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, interesting, I'm a researcher working in this area as it happens. Have you any particular classes of application you'd want to use this for? What level of performance hit would you be willing to take? Would you be happy to just have a mechanism that enables you to determine after the fact that you've been hacked or data has leaked due to a misconfiguration, or would you mainly be interested in mechanisms for pre…

I have been wanting this for a while as well. Performance is not a huge issue in this scenario for me, as security is the really the reason anyone would use this. I would want to prevent data from leaking completely if possible. My ideal scenario is that an adversary/host could take down my box, but they couldn't get at the content inside without my authentication. I don't want my instance to be clonable/rootable by…

So you don't ask for much then :). As I'm sure you're aware, even with TPMs/TXT/SGX/Trustzone etc, once your threat model includes a capable adversary like the NSA with physical access to your box, it's hard to see how you can provide bullet-proof guarantees. I'm excluding fully homomorphic encryption based systems on the grounds of practicality here (although there are interesting 'somewhat homomorphic' systems out there that achieve practicality by restricting what kind of operations you can perform on the data).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#562

Post by RivieraKid »

khebbie wrote: post #466

Hey how about "problem monday" then. It is said that often times you should not start with an idea, but rather with a problem. So maybe posting problems could lead to great ideas...

Many (most) good ideas don't solve problems but improve something, create new way to have fun etc. For example, I wouldn't say that Minecraft solves a problem (unless you define "problem" in a weird way).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#563

Post by Spittie »

mikejarema wrote: post #452

I'd like a way to skim through videos. Playing at 2x or 4x doesn't really do the trick. For contrast, if I'm skimming through an article, I can quickly scan for keywords, look for paragraph breaks & sentence breaks to get the gist of what a particular section of the text is describing. How can I skim a video the same way? I'm more interested in a solution for a 30 or 60 minute recorded lecture or conference keynote t…

One possible way I could think is to have the video and the transcript side by side. Then you could skim around the transcript, and clicking on a phrase should bring you to that point in the video.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#564

Post by stevenspasbo »

BadCookie wrote: post #320
d0m wrote: post #269

Idea: Airbnb for food. An app where you buy meals cooked by your neighbors. I see two big trends these days. 1) People seems more willing to connect back with their neighbors and community. 2) People have less time but want to eat more healthy. Imagine this scenario: While going back home, a student could check on the app what's available to eat for tonight. Next to his place, there's a family willing to sell the ext…

Major legal problems with this, unfortunately (at least in the US). You pretty much HAVE to have a commercial kitchen in order to legally sell food in the United States, as well as be licensed by the state. It is cost prohibitive. Some states have what are called "cottage food laws" that enable individuals to sell food cooked in their home kitchens on a small scale, but there are many restrictions. (For example, in m…

What if it was donation based, like lyft or uber?

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#565

Post by natdempk »

anonymousDan wrote: post #561
natdempk wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been wanting this for a while as well. Performance is not a huge issue in this scenario for me, as security is the really the reason anyone would use this. I would want to prevent data from leaking completely if possible. My ideal scenario is that an adversary/host could take down my box, but they couldn't get at the content inside without my authentication. I don't want my instance to be clonable/rootable by…

So you don't ask for much then :). As I'm sure you're aware, even with TPMs/TXT/SGX/Trustzone etc, once your threat model includes a capable adversary like the NSA with physical access to your box, it's hard to see how you can provide bullet-proof guarantees. I'm excluding fully homomorphic encryption based systems on the grounds of practicality here (although there are interesting 'somewhat homomorphic' systems out…

I guess, but it still seems like no one offers this and its not trivial. Do you know of any research/systems/practical offerings in this area? This has been something that I would be interested in learning a lot more about honestly. I agree that bullet-proof guarantees are basically impossible and that physical security is probably going to be the weak point at the end of the day. Maybe some system could be created that made it hard to individually tamper with one instance without alerting others, or made it hard to isolate one from another from a hardware view? Do you think even something like SGX can't prevent some level of physical threats? It seems like it would at least make it harder/reduce the scenarios in which hardware is vulnerable, but I haven't researched it extensively.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#566

Post by slig »

eli wrote: post #388

An ESP (email service provider) geared towards people publishing content instead of marketers. Marketers are certainly the bigger & better market, but they have hundreds of options to choose from. Almost no one targets publishers. (ping me if interested... I know more than anyone should about email)

I think Tiny Letter " rel="nofollow">https://tinyletter.com/> does what you want.

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#567

Post by kareemm »

sage_joch wrote: post #372

A service that facilitates company matching of employee donations to non-political charities. Ideally, the service should make it as effortless as possible for all participants: employee, company, charity. This could be generalized into a kind of philanthropic social network.

www.chimp.net does this in Canada (been a client of mine for several years and counting).

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#568

Post by mavdi »

yread wrote: post #526
paulkaplan wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed?

I think mavdi really meant "diagnosed sooner". Or perhaps cancer deaths could be prevented? Either way, just google "cancer blood in urine" or stool and you get the idea.

yes indeed, sorry I meant cancer deaths prevented

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#569

Post by rdl »

natdempk wrote: post #565
anonymousDan wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't ask for much then :). As I'm sure you're aware, even with TPMs/TXT/SGX/Trustzone etc, once your threat model includes a capable adversary like the NSA with physical access to your box, it's hard to see how you can provide bullet-proof guarantees. I'm excluding fully homomorphic encryption based systems on the grounds of practicality here (although there are interesting 'somewhat homomorphic' systems out…

I guess, but it still seems like no one offers this and its not trivial. Do you know of any research/systems/practical offerings in this area? This has been something that I would be interested in learning a lot more about honestly. I agree that bullet-proof guarantees are basically impossible and that physical security is probably going to be the weak point at the end of the day. Maybe some system could be created t…

SGX is pretty reasonable IFF you believe in the Intel PKI.

I have been looking at how to do cheap ($20-50 slow USB connected (essentially smartcard), $500-1000 PCIe) HSMs. If you do shared-computation with a host (with or without SGX/TXT), you can get pretty decent performance with quite modest HSM hardware.

Those provide NSA-type protection -- in that attacking a single instance isn't guaranteed, and takes time, so a system with key rotation or k of n split across locations is going to provide pretty reasonable security.

Private Core is definitely the most interesting TXT-based solution today; if you built an IaaS provider with that tech plus live video monitoring, alarms, etc., you could probably offer quite reasonable security assurances to people. (i.e. the tools to defeat it require physical access, and if no one can gain physical access to a rack once the rack is put into production...)

Re: Ask HN: Idea Sunday

#570

Post by GBond »

epeterson19 wrote: post #416

Anyone been to an airport lately? All open outlets are swarmed upon by people charging and keeping watch on their phones to make sure they don't get stolen. How about mini lockers with miniusb and apple chargers in each locker. People swipe a credit card and can rent a mini locker to charge their phone is. I realize how low tech this is but it's less so than people babysitting charging phones.

http://gochargenow.com/locker.html
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