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by peterwiese 5202 days ago
the main problem i have with your concept is that it's not a solution but merely a workaround. what you're doing is basically hijacking different communication service providers like facebook and twitter to exchange encrypted content. this means that your service depends on the mercy of these providers, since they could easily ban the urls/ips your service posts instead of the original text. so, if this should ever become large scale, facebook & co would just break your service because they have no interest in this kind of usage of their platform.

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you didn't keep this apolitical at all. i only talked about an arab spring because you did so in your video. and i agree that your platform doesn't add any value for this kind use case, except the ease of use maybe, which i think isn't really a concern if you're operating in the political underground.

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if you don't want facebook to own your content and personal information, don't give it to them in the first place. this is obviously easer said than done. but your service creates just another dependency while solving nothing.

1 comments

They could ban the URLs, but not the IPs since the IPs come from the clients. Regardless, it is politically difficult for FB or other scrutinized companies to block a certain kind of hyperlink whose only purpose and use is to protect ones own content. The best thing Facebook could do for our funding is block us. I don't want to discuss workarounds, although they exist, because our ultimate goal is to move this system from a hack to a web standard. Sites could choose not to support it, but if there is enough pull into the system, they won't have a choice.

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We implicitly endorsed democratic movements like the Arab Spring by highlighting its use case, but you'll have to forgive me for going with a use case that is more likely to get media attention. The Arab Spring use case is stronger than you are letting on. Privly can facilitate group encryption keys, where only the members of the group can read or share the content. This allows the use of applications like the Facebook event system mashed together with email invitations and public tweets. Most people don't know how to use PGP, and group coordination is difficult without an easy to use and ubiquitous secure sharing system.

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"if you don't want facebook to own your content and personal information, don't give it to them in the first place." Agreed, but they can have my links.