alecperkins

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Everything posted by alecperkins

  1. Said idiot could also share private SMS or email messages with friends. Private communication depends on trusting the recipient. If anything, presenting it as something akin to Twitter makes it more clear that it’s effectively a broadcast, not necessarily a private message.
  2. The app works really well. Camera backup handled a few gigs of photos in a reasonable amount of time, and is much better than the periodic manual copying of photos I’ve been doing. Bugwise, I did run into that weirdness with the name and QR code. As for features, being able to change the sort of the files and search the filenames would be awesome. A basic text editor would also be nice. Even better would be allowing Sync to receive an “Open In” that lets you send a file (back) to it for syncing (I think the Dropbox iOS app does this).
  3. My key is: B2D3FUYVNFMK5ZU72A3ZXLDENX5XPWQXN Is there a proper place for publicizing these keys? @TheDurtch: I'm following now, but short of monitoring your transfers, I'm not sure how you could tell. Distributed is a gift and a curse.
  4. The publicly writable folder is definitely a risk, but there’s no other way to have an external prompt to a conversation without using some additional means. I requested a write-only key as a feature, which with proper whitelisting and BT Sync-enforced size limits could be reasonably secure and allow for external initiation, but that’s at the mercy of the BT Sync developers. The initial key exchange is definitely the hardest part about using BT Sync for messaging. Could you elaborate on the need for encryption on top of BT Sync’s already encrypted transmission? I opted for a plaintext protocol for simplicity. It has the benefit of always being forward and backward compatible, and not even needing a client really. You can read my thinking behind the purpose/process of Missive by adding this key: B2CNYVXULNUVYH42J5DN6YTHJT6ESXOR3. (I’ve had similar thoughts about doing multi-party messaging, which is inevitably messy.)
  5. I find the idea of using BT Sync for applications that aren’t directly about transferring files compelling. The potentially asymmetrical sharing and inherent distributed nature open up a lot of possibilities, on top of the relatively straightforward API that is manipulating the filesystem. (Programmatic creation and management of shares would expand on these possibilities dramatically.) I started playing with the idea of using BT Sync to power a simple, reasonably secure messaging system, and it’s turned out to be more intriguing than I expected. The nature of the underlying mechanism makes for some interesting qualities, positive and negative. Edit: just discovered Vole!
  6. I started toying with using BTSync as a messaging system, where users create outboxes for each other and exchange read-only secrets. The setup is a little cumbersome, and an API that allows for creating and managing shares would help automate nearly all the steps. (edit: Actually, even just a command-line version on non-Linux computers would solve this.) Also, not API-specific, but a write-only share would be interesting, to use as a public inbox for the above usecase, and also more generally. This kind of thing should have the ability to whitelist files based on parameters, like size, extension (regex pattern for the name, perhaps). Being able to customize the write-only secret, like the master secrets can be, would also be great, so they could be made more friendly and suitable for a public "address" of sorts.