Show HN: Newtiny - Record your Web History and Search anytime | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Newtiny - Record your Web History and Search anytime

newtiny.com

7 pointskuldeep_kap15 comments

You should really have some semblance of a privacy policy before asking people to send you their browsing history on all websites they visit.

Also, there have been other attempts at this (WebMynd, for example, before their most recent pivot). Would be great to know how Newtiny is different / better before installing.

I won't be trying out your service until you have the TOS and Privacy Policy up and visible. As well as a video or walk through explaining what exactly this app does.

I can't stress the importance of this enough.

I am sure I would love your service, I used to index and collect my history for local searching, that project fell off over time. I hope your project could be the rebirth of it as it did prove an invaluable resource.

trickjarrett

I appreciate your concern. I'll try tp put that up as soon as possible. It was a weekend project and I put it out for everyone out of sheer excitement. I'll appreciate if you can try the service out and help me with the feedback. Thanks!

  Look it as an alternative to the bookmarking service. You never have to click on a button to record your favorite pages.

Personally I want to use a bookmarking service (currently using historious) because it works so much better than history ever can.

I love how I can search history through the address bar to find a site that I know the title or URL of (which, therefore, i wouldn't really have much trouble finding through a search engine if I lost my history), but I find that actually searching for a lost link in browser history is absolutely horribly.

Yesterday evening I got into an argument with a colleague over how GSM works (Vodafone's network in the UK had severe downtime in many areas for much of the day), and I wanted to look up an article I had read in the last month or so about the man who thought up SMS, and his quotes on why it was limited to 160 characters.

It wasn't interesting enough for me to want to bookmark at the time, but it would have been useful last night. I spent about ten minutes trying to find it (through searching for keyworks in the history, to looking for related HN topics, as I know I found that article through a link from this site - eventually I was just scrolling down the list at what I think was roughly the date on which I might have read it).

I definitely read it on this computer, in this browser, within a time period that it is still in my history. Somewhere, but I sure as hell don't know where.

Eventually I gave up and bothered to Google it, what a surprise, it took me hardly any time to find what I wanted.

Afterthought: Maybe the Google should offer to archive your history and provide a search engine of just pages that you've viewed. We get a much better way to trace our footsteps, Google get even more data with which to target adverts towards us, win win.

It all comes down to the search. I know we have a lot of work to do on that front.

Bookmarking mostly never worked for me, because like you pointed out in the example, you may never know what information you might have to recall.

We may come up with a way to 'star' a link to help bring up the favorite pages.

As a non-Chrome user I'm not your target audience anyway - but if you were doing it for Firefox (or if I were a Chrome user), it would take a lot of very positive endorsements to get me interested enough to really try it out. Until then I'll settle with the fact that browser history will very rarely be the best way to find something I've seen before - most of the time I will have bookmarked what I later want to re-read, so it's not a huge issue anyway.

quick question: Can I be sure that the service will not index my confidential site visits (banking, creditcards, etc.) and/or capture information sent to those sites (usernames, passwords, etc.)?

On the download page it says that I grant your plugin "Your data on all websites." That couldn't sound less appealing.

If there is a way to bypass the collection and indexing of certain sites (I'm assuming, too, that it is stored and indexed on your servers), then you might want to explain how that happens from a link on your front page.

I'm interested, but your website doesn't motivate me enough to install a plugin that threatens privacy.

I'd love this if data were encrypted and hosted locally.

Guys thanks for trying out the service.

It's completely secured. I am encrypting data on all sides. Your data will be completely private. It literally started as a weekend project and now, on monday I am releasing it. So please bear with me as this looks like a rudimentary offering. Please feel free to use the service. I appreciate your feedback.

"It's completely secured." -- Yikes, I'd never have the courage to make such a statement.

How is my encryption key generated and where/how it is stored on your server?

Forgive me if the key is generated by me on the client -- I'm afraid to try your plugin, so I'm not sure if that functionality exists. Looking forward to trying it out once I know more.

I don't know you well enough to believe that your "weekend project" can be "completely secured" by Monday morning.

Apologies if its a bit hard on you, but when you make overwhelming claims it opens you up to criticism from all sides.

So, given that all these hackers want to know whether they can trust this, I downloaded the pkg and had a look at the source code. The main file seems legit. I don't understand the popup.html file and the call to flickr though. (also, the packaging is a bit sloppy with two copies of the same file).

Sorry about that. You are right, i think I forgot to remove popup.html file, which was an example from Google.

Someone please explain to me why just using the browser cache isn't enough?

Your browsing cache will just go back to a limited time. This you'll feel free even if you switch your comp, crash it or clear your cache.

Look it as an alternative to the bookmarking service. You never have to click on a button to record your favorite pages. Even if you miss it to click, you'll still have it stored somewhere.

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