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Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

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Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#161

Post by tptacek »

mcxx wrote: post #155
limmeau wrote: post #79

A database of MAC addresses of stolen equipment. Participants install a client which listens for the MAC addresses of all computers in the local network, alerting the participant that the new possessor of a stolen MacBook Pro 15", 2006 edition, two deep scratches on the lid, seems to be nearby. Of course, you'd have to find a way of guarding against malicious entries.

MAC address can be changed.

99.999% of people who steal hardware aren't smart enough to do this. Also, 99.9999999% of people who use stolen hardware have bought it (off eBay for instance) and won't scrub it, but will plug it in somewhere that's monitoring.

I think this is a really good idea.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#162

Post by run4yourlives »

jgrahamc wrote: post #91

Nappies (diapers) for babies that have a little pocket with a couple of wipes in it. Basically I want to be able to stuff a couple of nappies in by jacket pocket or bag and then when the baby needs changing I've got a fresh nappy and a couple of wipes.

Patent that wipe in sealed package idea and take it to huggies/pampers. See what happens!

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#163

Post by tptacek »

run4yourlives wrote: post #147
olefoo wrote: post #63

A cradle that updates the baby's facebook page based on decibels, activity, dampness.

Shouldn't the parent pay more attention to the baby than to facebook? :-) Just Saying.

He's not saying that, he's saying that you should be living his parenthood vicariously through Facebook. I agree: you should.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#164

Post by tim_church »

mdasen wrote: post #99

So, many cities have bus systems and those bus systems now-a-days are usually GPS equipped for several reasons (notably that a central office can monitor the system and that the busses can announce ADA-compliant stop messages based on location without the driver being involved). I'd love to have something on my phone that would tell me where the next bus was on a cool Google Map (or other) and an estimated time to ar…

San Francisco uses http://www.nextbus.com/

I love this service. Very useful.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#165

Post by tptacek »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #48
tocomment wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds interesting, could you expand on that?

he probably wants news.google.com but in a format like mail.google.com's threads. kind of like techmeme, i imagine.

I want blogs to look like Usenet, so that best affordance for a response is another blog post, not a comment. Comments are evil.

There's enough structure in blogs (blogrolls, tags, date, author, backlinks) --- especially if you mine comments --- to do take a stab at this.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#167

Post by strlen »

apgwoz wrote: post #88
strlen wrote: post #74

A SLIME* for Python, Perl or Ruby ( http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/ ). All of these languages have a powerful reflection/meta programming facility (yes, Perl included). So technically, something like could be implemented: 1) The server (using Twisted in Python or POE in Perl) listens for requests. Requests are for objects. 2) The server looks at the request, serializes it into a s-exp describing the state of th…

> SLIME* for Python, Perl or Ruby I'm not entirely sure, but I think you might just have to implement a Swank server, and SLIME* would work without problems. It could be that you're forced to use s-expressions, but I doubt it.

I haven't looked at the client portion of SLIME in a while, but wouldn't there be some changes needed to deal with languages where statements and expression are different from each other?

Getting Perl code into an s-exp would be fairly difficult actually (as opposed to getting an s-exp from a Perl complex hash -- which would be really easily) - generally (with Perl5) the consensus is anything that can parse Perl, is Perl. Python, Ruby and Perl6 (which effectively is a Lisp, complete with macros in forms of first-order primitives for CFGs) would, I am sure, be easier a lot easier.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#168

Post by jncraton »

betageek wrote: post #89

Global Tabbing - I have a lot of windows open (as do you all i'm sure) and i'd really to be able to bundle them into one tabbed window in a Firefox stylee. Look at something like Coda (www.panic.com) and think instead of having all the apps built in to the app you just have a tabbed window container that you add app windows to that allows you to quickly switch from one to the other (eg. tabs for text editor,terminal,…

Like this?

http://wintabber.com/screenshots/

(Windows only)

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#169

Post by jerf »

vaksel wrote: post #153
jcl wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the accounts go dead mostly because the content providers kill them, not because individual users kill them. There isn't much you can do to stop a content provider from figuring out which accounts are bugmenot accounts and killing them... It's an arms race to see who will give up first.

more reason to keep the login info secret. Sure they can figure out the account by multiple ips...but that takes a little bit more effort. Honestly, I think the user side portion is a bigger problem. Its all the psychology, people change the login info so that noone else would be able to do the same thing and prevent their access.

You can not hide login info from the people you are logging into. All they have to do is install your plugin and start logging in. Whatever clever algorithm you put in place to expire canceled accounts works in their favor too. Less than a day's worth of scripting and I can fully automate this within Firefox.

I'll say it again: Whatever counter claim you think you have, you can not hide login info from the people you are logging into.

Re: Post a possibly good app idea that you have no intention of doing yourself.

#170

Post by jcl »

vaksel wrote: post #153
jcl wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the accounts go dead mostly because the content providers kill them, not because individual users kill them. There isn't much you can do to stop a content provider from figuring out which accounts are bugmenot accounts and killing them... It's an arms race to see who will give up first.

more reason to keep the login info secret. Sure they can figure out the account by multiple ips...but that takes a little bit more effort. Honestly, I think the user side portion is a bigger problem. Its all the psychology, people change the login info so that noone else would be able to do the same thing and prevent their access.

In addition to Jerf's comment, I will also point out that you can't hide the login info from the content providers. All they have to do is steganographically encode the user name into the web page content. Then they can use your bugmenot-like service to retrieve the page, extract the user name, and cancel the account.

I still see no benefit to the users changing the account info. This is to access sites with free accounts, yes? In that case, isn't it actually just as much work to assert control over multiple bugmenot accounts as it is to sign up for the free accounts in the first place?

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