Show HN: Anysphere, home for important, long-form conversations (gist.github.com)
We think that no existing platform for point–to-point communication prioritizes the conversations that you actually care about and that really matter. Instant messaging is filled with careless texts and stickers, email is filled with receipts and spammers, and physical mail, while better in those respects, is slow and cumbersome. None of the existing platforms are private enough.
Anysphere attempts to fix this. It is private, secure, desktop-first and only allows people you added to contact you. Our whitepaper (https://anysphere.co/anysphere-whitepaper.pdf) describes our privacy and security model in detail — in short, we protect all of your data and metadata against everyone (even our own server). Our client is fully open source: https://github.com/anysphere/client.
We deployed a small server to open up testing to everyone in the HN community. Instructions are here: https://gist.github.com/arvid220u/d960ca6483bf5f295498d9de99....
I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
20 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadI couldn’t find any explanation about it on the GitHub page. Just buzzwords. I’m not trying it out without telling me what it actually is and does.
You have got to drop statements like this. It’s obviously false, and is embarrassing to read. I didn’t bother looking further into the software after this.
I do agree that there is a general problem where companies make hyperbolic claims, especially when it comes to security/privacy. For example, “zero trust” has been abused by so many people that even in the cases where it might apply, you cannot say that it applies to you because the term has lost its meaning. In our case, users do not need to place any trust in our servers, but we decided not to call it “zero trust” because people have taken it to mean “trust your employees less” or something else similarly outrageous.
If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our messaging here I’d love to take them. In other words, how could we convey that we are indeed the only completely private communication platform, without provoking a reaction similar to yours?
Specifically, what are you talking about protecting? Does this extend to deep packet inspection? Because your paper doesn't mention anything about that either. OR, you know, literally just talking to another server. You don't mention relays. You casually mention Tor in passing but make no concrete statements about the design of it by comparison.
Your paper isn't rigorous, your claims are superfluous, and they further attempt to discredit security progress across the entire field.
YOU are the only one who has ever created truly secure communication? Get real. What a complete joke.
It's like someone selling water and saying no one has ever created pure water before US.
Edit: If you want to appeal to security people, use plain language, be precise, and state your intentions. You do none of those things with this software.
Instead you:
* Use provably wrong marketing language
* Propose a provably wrong whitepaper
* Do not state your intentions for building the software
What it looks like to me is that you received some modest funding ($200,000) to write software and your sponsors didn't realize your work doesn't pass the smell test.
Let us know if there is anything else you want to be proved, or if the adversary in the paper is not strong enough :).
> We think that no existing platform for point–to-point communication prioritizes the conversations that you actually care about and that really matter.
> Anysphere attempts to fix this.
What is the business model behind Anysphere? > Paid monthly subscriptions.
I wish the authors every ounce of luck they can find - there is so much wrong with this project and their approach, I hope they fail fast, learn some useful lessons, and try something else.