Felony – An open-source PGP keychain • Hacker News Board

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#191

Post by asimjalis » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

asimjalis wrote: post #183

henryboldi wrote: post #2

Hi I'm Henry, the creator of Felony I’ve had a passion for politics, history, and programming since the age of 12 growing up in a suburb of Chicago. During my freshman year, I developed an interest in software. A couple of apps and hackathons (programming competitions) later, I was working on my own startups when I made the leap to drop out of high school to become a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup…

Nice. How do you encrypt something? I see Add Key, Verify, Sign, Decrypt as options. I don’t see Encrypt.

Ok. I get it. You need to add someone else’s key before you can encrypt. It would be nice if I could encrypt messages to myself.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#192

Post by x1798DE » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

henryboldi wrote: post #37

menzoic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Felony is the first PGP app that's easy for anyone to use" How about calling it "Freedom"

Wow, I like this a lot!

I would consider naming it something other than a common English phrase, honestly. I know it's the big trend these days, but it's making things incredibly hard to search for. Try searching for the messaging service "matrix" and the matrix client "vector". Insane amount of namespace collision there.

Best to go with something like Freechain or something so at least people can search for it.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#193

Post by danso » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:10 PM UTC

henryboldi wrote: post #8

gort wrote: post #5

I'm not sure this is the name to use if you want people of only average political commitment to use your app. Although at least it's a striking name.

Thanks! We found it randomly by searching available .io domain names.

i don't think it's worth naming a product based on available domain names. It helps in the branding sure, but it doesn't make up for diastarous names.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#194

Post by Sir_Substance » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:10 PM UTC

knorker wrote: post #150

This name is awful. I would never want to contribute to it, nor use it. Nor suggest it to anyone as a solution to anything. It's the worst name since that framework called "cocaine" with tools and subprojects named after illicit drug market terms. Yeah, "felony" and "cocaine" are not things I will put on my CV or would like to show up when someone Googles my name. What's the joke here? That some people are incorrectl…

>Do you know what most "felons" did to be called that? It's not for what they said and wrote that should be constitutionally protected.

Exercised journalistic integrity and protected an anonymous sources?

http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title18/part...

The press is free, as long as it doesn't protect sources that have leaked embarrassing information about the armed forces.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#195

Post by iheartmemcache » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:11 PM UTC

slacka wrote: post #182

cdnsteve wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like an interesting project but has a poor name choice. If it's targeted at non technical users, it may actually prevent them from using it, out of fear that just using it is illegal.

How about "The Fourth"? The name denotes privacy and won't scare off people by sounding illegal.

I immediately know what you mean since I was born and raised in the US, but most people will be left scratching their heads unless they're really well versed in the historical legislation of other countries. (I consider myself fairly well versed in international relations, but if someone made an app referring to a specific UK Act of Parliament I'd be confused.) But I agree, Felony isn't the best name.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#196

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:33 PM UTC

SNvD7vEJ wrote: post #93

henryboldi wrote: post #2

Hi I'm Henry, the creator of Felony I’ve had a passion for politics, history, and programming since the age of 12 growing up in a suburb of Chicago. During my freshman year, I developed an interest in software. A couple of apps and hackathons (programming competitions) later, I was working on my own startups when I made the leap to drop out of high school to become a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup…

Please change the name of the app. I'm Swedish, and to me the name sounds really repelling. Maybe someone could fork the application and rename it to something cool that I can use?

[deleted]

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#197

Post by imron » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 10:40 PM UTC

Esau wrote: post #63

bwghughes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think folks should chill on the name. It's just a word which makes it stand out as a product. Good job !!

I disagree. Associating cryptography to a criminal term is not wise.

Exactly. How many future whistleblowers would consider using a tool named 'felony'.

I'm guessing exactly zero.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#198

Post by mrmondo » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 11:12 PM UTC

cdnsteve wrote: post #16

henryboldi wrote: post #2

Hi I'm Henry, the creator of Felony I’ve had a passion for politics, history, and programming since the age of 12 growing up in a suburb of Chicago. During my freshman year, I developed an interest in software. A couple of apps and hackathons (programming competitions) later, I was working on my own startups when I made the leap to drop out of high school to become a software engineer at a venture-backed tech startup…

This looks like an interesting project but has a poor name choice. If it's targeted at non technical users, it may actually prevent them from using it, out of fear that just using it is illegal.

Yeah was thinking this too, as a techie I like it, but to the general user or business it screams IM DOING SOMETHING ILLEGAL!

Question: what's the memory usage like A) at idle, B) after some using and left running for a day or two?

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#199

Post by reviseddamage » Tue, Jul 05, 2016, 12:01 AM UTC

committing felony. it's a github pun meta isn't it.

Re: Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

#200

Post by danso » Tue, Jul 05, 2016, 12:25 AM UTC

I've heard about optimizing for developer happiness, but this is kind of silly.

- the app has an unintuitive and harmful name that casts aspersions on the core values it purportedly touts because the developer saw that it was an available .io domain [0]

- This app has a shitton of leftover boilerplate and dev dependencies from a bootstrap scaffold, even though AFAIK there is no testing suite. (Because we all know how safe npm dependencies are...)

- A good number of unnecessary non-dev dependencies too. It includes font-awesome, which seems unnecessary to include in its entirety already...but are there any uses of font-awesome? I did a search for "font-awesome" and "fa-" but couldn't find any.

I understand using boilerplate generators to learn the ropes of creating within a framework...I've done it to learn React and Angular. But to use a scaffold-generator for a niche and highly specialized/sensitive app like this? It can't mean that it's anything more than a toy app. And yet one in which the decision to give it the name "felony" just looks immature on the author's part, meaning that it's not even useful as a resume padder.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030422