Fighting human trafficking with self-contained applications

lwn.net

22 points·chmaynard··8 comments

I love seeing stories of people building things to make the world better, rather than “Juicero but make it AI.”

I didn’t pick up on it from the article, but why local binaries over a SaaS? It seems like that app would be the ideal candidate for a client server model… she wouldn’t need to worry about old Windows machines or firewalls or installing it on non-technical users’ machines, as long as they had a browser.

They mentioned something about “locked down enterprise environments” but I don’t know what that means.

Edit: oh, maybe “locked down environments + firewalls” means these machines have no internet egress so you would have to poke holes in a firewall to reach the internet?

Strict chain of custody requirements prohibit this kind of thing from being SaaS.

Could you elaborate a bit?

Don’t mean to dig in on this, but I googled for some chain of custody / evidence tracking SaaS and found: QueTel, SAFE by Tracker Products, CustodyChain, and BlazeStack.

Just curious. I probably have to read up on what chain of custody really entails.

I found the whole thing inspirational

This has to be the dumbest argument for Rust that I have ever seen. It doesn't belong on LWN.

Do you disagree that its easy to cross compile and create static binaries with?

It is, but Go is easier, and various other languages also have this property. It is not a sufficient argument for Rust. In fact, large Rust projects are well known to take a very long time to recompile.

I suspect it's there because it ticks a bunch of virtue-signaling boxes. DEI, Rust, some "safety and security" boogeyman.

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