Show HN: Anonymous messaging with a 1km radius
zonemessenger.com
zonemessenger.com
A program to do that would do a bisection search along a line (faking coordinates for the location of the device) to find the point on the line where you transition to seeing the person's messages. Then, repeat along other two lines in different directions. Each transition point gives a circle of 1 km radius on which the person is present, and the one point shared by all three circles is their location.
This could be mitigated by rounding off coordinates to be coarse enough that it doesn't give their precise location before calculating the distance.
More info: https://grindrmap.neocities.org/
Comparison amongst gay dating apps (from 2014) https://grindrmap.neocities.org/overview.html
Using triangulation to pinpoint an other users location would therefore require to move in and out of range (while the targeted user is continuously sending messages). Thus significantly more difficult than if the actual distance measure was depicted in the UI or leaked elsewhere.
Finally closing the API to outside requests limits the ease with which the above could be automated. Any idea's for further improving these security measures are most welcome!
That, or a number of co-operating clients located at various locations in and out of the range.
A simple fix would be to have every sender generate a random vector of random length 0-100 meters (and re-generate every time you've moved at least 100 meters, you don't want to regenerate if the sender doesn't move as you'd be able to zero-in on a prolific sender), and have the message "originate" from the end of that vector.
Or spoofing their actual location.
That kind of thing combined with some rate limits (how often one can attempt to connect to a user) should be effective.
(edit) Actually, I think I like mseebach's suggestion even more: For each user, pick a random location about 100m away from them, then pretend they're there until they've moved far enough away, then repeat.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...
For example an attacker can just spoof enough accounts to sample from your distribution to figure out the true center. Imagine spoofing a grid of users with let's say K fake accounts per dot, then if you plot the histogram of who managed to connect you will see a very clear bump in the 2d histogram in the shape of circle.
The solution in your edit is much better.
Source: I've done this before and it is very accurate and creepy.
> This could be mitigated by rounding off coordinates to be coarse enough that it doesn't give their precise location before calculating the distance.
Reporting a slightly different location to users or varying the search radius per user search could help.
Some of thrm will also solve the problem of just discovering a user, starting a chat and then instantly loosing them, even though you were both siting still, as you were on the border.
Anonymous has become a pointless buzzword in this NSA-era we be living in. Just say it's a hyper-local instant messaging app, because any half woke individual will know that nothing on the internet is anonymous really anymore. A percentage of all our internet activity is sitting on a rack somewhere in the Utah desert.
Get over it.
Even in a pseudonymous environment where the venue operator presumably knows who you are (like HN), the assumption that other users cannot easily trace your words to your IRL identity reduces friction in communication. Environments where everyone publicly posts under their real identity, with those posts retained forever, tend towards low-information social signaling.
Lol. Have you read the news in the last 30 years?
I do agree somewhat with your point though.
Not trying to be negative; I know your intentions are good, but be please be prepared. When the police call you in the middle of the night, and they will, make sure you can provide whatever information you can to identify the users. I am actually surprised you would be able to get into the Apple store without being able to do so.
Basically, if you use this near a school, then the school will be the main topic of conversation. And in that case (assuming students using this), half the conversations may be "So-and-so is a ____"
Is there any thought of community moderation?
https://medium.com/secret-den/sunset-bc18450478d5#.7bzsu8ut6
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/technology/a-founder-of-se...
The real reason social media sites die without moderation is not because it alienates people who take bullying, it is that when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere. Reddit survives because it is a status pyramid scheme. HN survives because of similar aspiration to be seen as that smart person in front of a VC audience, a kind of Enders Game fantasy.
Facebook and Twitter are waning not because of trolls, but because they have signaled a nannying supervisory role that reduces overall user optionality, and takes away the thing that drew people in in the first place: Hope.
They can make more money, but imho it will be through value added services on their graph and service diversification, not on user growth against todays advertising model.
>when there is no way to become a moderator, people seek status and power elsewhere
This is such an odd way to look at the world, I would need quite a bit more explanation. Not everyone is ambitious and competitive.
>HN survives because of similar aspiration to be seen as that smart person in front of a VC audience
Many of us (you included) participate here without any connection to our 'real' identities.
>Facebook and Twitter are waning not because of trolls, but because they have signaled a nannying supervisory role
I haven't seen this study, and my own anecdotal evidence says the novelty is wearing off.
However, not everyone is ambitious and competitive, but not everyone uses social media. They do seek a sense of approval (or attention), even if it is defracted via a pseudonym. Most social studies are irreproducible bunk anyway.
Our 'real' identities are but a hash away, where you give me a place to contact you and tell you the contents of this sha1 sum: b967696ff8376ccd0feb6170b469e23588d702bd . If you wanted to get fancy, we could start by agreeing on a modulus and a base....
Being a little paranoid about privacy myself I tried to build the platform with as little logging etc. as possible. This of course also makes it harder to avoid misuse of the platform.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study... [1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Any advise on how to market/keep people engaged are most welcome.
Also, don't miss this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12804222
1. Do you need to "log in" to use it? Or can it be used without an account?
2. Can you have hidden/secret conversations? That is, the conversation isn't easily observable by everyone within 1km?
If one wishes to continue a conversation one-on-one I believe other applications are better suited for that. I therefore build only one private function:
The exchange of contact details if both parties agree. If one wishes to participate in an exchange of details. It is also for this function only required to fill in some form of details. The idea being you can than continue your conversation in private elsewhere.
When stuff happens around me when I'm sitting at home I find twitter to be too slow to update and it has a lack of information anyways.
But then you're just dealing with the same network effects that twitter is having trouble with.
And relaying messages to people further away... Though it wasn't anonymous, and people knew where to tell people to send the messages towards.
The "tech level" indicates which level of technology is needed for a particular piece of equipment to be available and/or normal (won't get you burned at the stake for using "magic") - in Traveller it is used to label different worlds in the universe AFAIK - with GURPS it also extends to cross-dimensinal travel, alternate realities, time travel etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-playing_game... http://unblockedallgames.com/unblocked-games/happy-wheels
Anonymity plus a shared reference point of being near each other (mine was 400ft) produced either random attempts at discussion that never matured into a conversation, or focused vitriol at real people.
We ended up discontinuing the app as it was hard to overcome the double network effect (needing people you actually want to chat with, and needing them to be nearby), and the only times where it did was because of a pretty reprehensible use case.
When I saw the headline, I thought this used some sort of ad-hoc Wifi network with MAC spoofing and couldn't figure out how they got 1km of range.
The metadata is the problem for true anonymity, not the amount of information that individual users can see, or that the server stores in its database.
It looks like a commercially backed app. What is the business model here? Paid access or advertising?
As of now there is no commercial backing what so ever. It's mealy a side-project that finally got finished. And for now there is also monetizing scheme implemented.
Over Quota
This application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.Fyi, i ran a facebook group with 15 k. people for Belgium. The #2. A little bit late to the party of location based messaging concering Pokémon though ;)
Because as of now I'm not perusing making any money from the app, I opted to test the feasibility of the core idea. Talking to local people. One could of course argue that I could deviate from this slightly (variable range) to reach this critical mass.
Adapting the radius to match the number of people available seems like a great idea. If there's only one person within 1km, step up to 2km, 3km, etc. until some number X of people are available. If there are too many people, step back down.
The app is called hoody (https://hoody.im) and I can't wait to post it to HN. I was actually a bit bummed to see this as I figured they had _just_ beaten me to the post, but in fact our apps are slightly different.
It's anonymous, with auto-generated nicknames as well, but the chat areas are dynamic based on activity in your area. So if no one is using it, it goes worldwide, and shrinks down as people around you are active (country level, city level, suburb), down to a minimum of around 700 metres.
Look for it on HN in the next couple days! ;)
All the best! and looking forward to your launch on HN
By increasing the range until there is activity, it gives it a way to get off the ground and a way for it to work for people who aren't packed in a city.
As a pretty active consumer of anonymous content, I'd hate to be without it now.
Not to undermine your valid points but it is a pull medium, not a push. You're free not to consume.
I expect twitter to end up in 2 tiers, the verified default view and the anonymous dark forest (what we have today) you can opt into.
Are people this social, and this lonely? "Let me spend this 30 minutes of free time to talk to some random potential weirdo!"
The initial idea was to achieve the atmosphere we used to have in (Dutch) public transport. Everyone could participate/listen to a couple of public conversations being held.
If you are within the range of one user, who is having a conversation with someone in their range but not in yours, will you only see one side of their conversation?
I would imagine Zone can probably break free of the age association and maybe grab people with the same sort of "town bulletin board" feel, but it's going to have a lot of conflicting user bases, and probably lots of trouble with harassment in local areas. YikYak had tons of issues with the harassment [0] problem until the user base took on a much more serious approach to moderating. The few times I was told by a student that there was something bad on YikYak, it had already been moderated out of visibility.
I don't know how Zone's posting works or if it has moderation or not, but hopefully the user base takes a similar approach.
[0] To expand on the harassment, it wasn't just nasty messages being written, it was stalker-ish comments tracking individual's activities, threats against persons, calls for vandalism, and so on. On a smaller University campus, it's taken a lot more seriously. We also had issues with student workers abusing access privileges and leaking private information to YikYak, which was dealt with appropriately by the administration.
Like mentioned the non-linearity with regard to latitude makes standard trigonometry useless. In my case I opted for the haversine formula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haversine_formula) this is pretty accurate on the small range of 1km
Did you develop this as a side project, or is this something you want to turn into a business?
Letting people talk, harassment and all seems to be the way to go. It's an opt in thing, so if you don't like it just uninstall or ignore a few users. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a good cesspool sometimes.
Currently I'm working on a different that, although also a software project, is more closely linked to applications/technologies that I love. It is this project I indeed aim to turn into a viable business.
Technology can be used for good and for bad, this tech is no different in that respect.
Communication apps like this, not so much.
This is why service and software makers are considered to have more of a responsibility to be concerned with misuse of their platforms. (ETA:I mean platforms, as in publicly-accessible stuff on the net, that's under their control.)
If 'bullying' in a social app/service continues, then yes, there is option to stop using it.
But if that service has value, users are going to want to keep using it, but they're going to ask for a better service.
Count me out as an (interested) user because I'm on Ubuntu Phone now.
An exception was FireChat, which built a mesh network using the Bluetooh & Wifi-based connectivity API provided by iOS called "Multipeer Connectivity Framework", so you could talk to someone far away as long as there were other users between you, which served as routers.
You could also break things down by geofence, but that would work better for a city chat since there would need to be overlapping fences otherwise you could be next to someone and not see their messages.
There are other ways to do it, but if you are going to use Internet connectivity, that's the simplest I believe.
/shout DING!
Are they taking control of the wifi chip and making it so the packets are allowed to take much longer to arrive to cover the greater distances?
Much less interesting now compared to actual proximity apps.
I remember a friend used whatsapp for the first time because it helped to get laid... until everybody had it.
This could be better: no need to drive.
See -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice#Form_of_notic...