Ask HN: Review our startup: Deniable Video

Generally when I hear the term "deniable" used with something security related, I think of something like the hidden volumes in True Crypt: something that I can't be proved to have.

Does your product provide this level of deniability? I would venture a guess that the answer is no (after all, there is a box with a big "DV" on it). If not, what do you mean by the word deniable?

Ditto. I'm a grad student studying security, and I'm not convinced that this is deniable. How will you deny the DV box (or even unlabeled camera & microphone) in your meeting area when the feds suddenly raid the place? How will you deny the private key on that USB drive you are very very careful to store securely, lest you lose the ability to view the video? I believe that history predicts that once the existing of these things have been proven to a court, you'll be either producing the passphrase or getting thrown in jail for contempt of court.

http://xkcd.com/538/

Presumably, you lose access to it, but nobody else is able to access your video either.

Yeah I read a little more and realized that the video is actually stored on the device. For some reason I didn't get that immediately.

I would have concerns using something like this, if someone ransacked my place of business or whatever (and it looks like this is targeted towards people who might have that sort of problem), it would be problematic if I couldn't view the video it recorded just because I didn't have the USB key anymore.

It would also bug me that I couldn't store an encrypted version of my videos for backup (of course I could encrypt them myself, but that kind of defeats the purpose of this device). So if I wanted to have some redundancy I'd have to store un-encrypted backups of my data, or be at the mercy of someone stealing my device.

For $6,000, I'm afraid I'd pass on this.

The layout is good, however, I have one suggestion:

Left align your text. Follow the advice of this book by Robin Williams:

"Find a strong alignment and stick to it."

"Avoid using more than one text alignment on the page (that is, don't center some text and right-align other text).

And please try very hard to break away from a centered alignment unless you are consciously trying to create a more formal, sedate presentation. Choose a centered alignment consciously, not by default."

- The Non-Designer's Design Book: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice. http://books.google.com/books?id=n1AuwXafMO8C&lpg=PT42&#....

Take a look at the chapter above she shows some good examples of how to integrate images into a layout.