software-ideas

I have been putting some real thought into this as an idea for client-side scraping and re-presentation [0]. I have come to the conclusion we just need a community maintained set of code that turns popular websites into APIs that people can program against. If you turn that into an easier-to-read-sans-BS page by querying the API, so be it. It of course needs to be deployed as part of the app, there are legal issues with hosting the API externally. I have started some work around this concept for my own personal use on pages that give me too much guff. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/82

The idea I had a year ago [0] was to bake the host names inside of WASM with hardcoded character lookups. You can build WASM from inside JS easily enough, or in other ways, and just ship hostnames.wasm with the product. Maybe I should revisit the idea with benchmarks. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/68

I think we can do better than AMP. How about having no Google affiliation and making it a strict subset of HTML+CSS? Those AMP tags make the likelihood of independent implementations much lower. Can we just remove client-side dynamism/interactivity from the picture at least at first or as an option? We can go a long way with pure, strict, reduced HTML+CSS (still includes HTML forms). I've been toying with this idea myself [0], but the key is strictness and complete no-runtime-needed backwards compat w/ current HTML+CSS. And for goodness sake, no proxies, pre-rendering, etc. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/92

Hrmm, can execute JS in FF's JSON viewer it seems. Still even with JS available there are more steps required to deanonymize. > This Tor Browser exploit was acquired by Zerodium many months ago as a zero-day and was shared with our government customers Of course it was. The surface area of browser tech is just so large. We need a subset of html+css and a browser that only renders that with a really simple implementation (plus side, low bandwidth and terminal friendly). Not a full browser with features conditionally disabled. I haven't put enough thought into client-side scriptability so I'd punt on it for now, but I did put thought into other parts the other day [0]. Many onion services don't want all the features of the modern web anyways. The TBB can still exist for users of full sites of course. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-id

Heh, I made a similar thing (mostly unreleased/undocumented at [0], original idea at [1]) that would take your Go code, build a binary wrapper for it using the target OS arch, SSH to the target, SCP the file over, run the binary, connect stdout/stderr/stdin with the remote, allow the remotely running binary to request files from the home binary, and delete itself once complete. One thing I found is SCP/SFTP is a really slow transfer protocol and an alternative should be made available as an option (but leave SSH as the default). I believe that we are getting to a point where config management might as well be in a programming language instead of a bunch of ad-hoc scripts in templates that defer to dynamic language scripts and become a mess. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/systrument 1 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/1

Tangentially related idea[0]: A programmable robovac simulation environment. Can be gamified or an actual research environment, think "Kerbal Vacuum Program". 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/89

> If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. Yes...do all the same things but without requiring Google proxy it. There are several things orgs will do to optimize SEO, conforming to AMP rules can be another. Gaming SEO is a concern for all SEO requirements so surely that's a poor excuse for proxying. EDIT: But it did give me an idea on how to tell websites you aren't happy with something: https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/91

You and I must have like minds. I have even created an anon DHT PoC [0], conceptualized how the messaging might work [1], made a lib to use Tor easier since it's the best anon nat buster these days [2], began toying with a superset of reddit/slack/forums/etc (some grpc files at [3] and some impl in that same repo), and a bunch of other small things in order to arrive at this final destination. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/tor-dht-poc 1 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/6 2 - https://github.com/cretz/bine 3 - https://github.com/cretz/yukup/tree/master/yukup/pb/proto

This dovetails into an idea I had [0]. Basically just client side scrape the web as it's used and deliver people this plain text and simple forms. It would have a maintained set of definitions and potentially even logic to put a better "front" on all this bullshit. It's like reverse ad block where you only whitelist some content instead of blacklisting it. You could argue sites will get good at fighting it, but if used enough by the common user, they'd just alienate them (e.g. my scrape/front for Google search makes it clear which results the app has a friendly scrape/front for). 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/82

Were we a squeakier, more collective wheel it might be different. I had a similar thought a few months back actually: https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/66. But I can't be bothered to go run around on Twitter, Yelp, business-shame-site du jour all the time. It's why companies with self-imposed principles instead of purchased ones fare better in the long run, and it can't be quantified.