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/ideas/

There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already.

Legend

  • ✨ - Favorite Ideas. I really like this, and you could possible build a company of some of these.
  • 🎁 - I'd love to help you build this, consider this like a bounty
  • 🚀 Someone (might be me) built this!
  • 🚧 There is a work-in-progress implementation.
  • 👩‍🔬 Research ideas

❤️ You'll get a personal postcard from me for building something on this list

The 💩 ideas (I thought might work at one point, but no longer consider worth building) are at BADIDEAS.md.

Introduction

This is a open repository of personal ideas. Some of these are based on personal interactions, bug reports, and discussions I've had with lots of people. I've tried to give credit wherever possible. I also try to reference similar/existing projects that might relate to the idea, so if you know of something that is interesting in that space, file a PR or send me a link.

The emojis are just indicative. Make something people want is the YC motto, but sometimes you must make something for no good reason other than "just because".

✨🎁 Collaborative Bookmarking

There are a dozen bookmarking services out there, many of them quite well done. However, most services are focused on the idea that bookmarking is a lone-person habit, which someone does in isolation.

I've often described the idea as "dropbox for bookmarks". The core concept is to allow a bookmarking "tag/folder" to be shared with another user, two-way. This means any of the shared members can add/remove bookmarks from that folder. All updates (addition/deletion/edits) are notified to every member in the group.

Bookmarking for Teams, in essence. Some good alternatives are listed in this quora answer, which you should read and follow if you're interested in this.

I've described this idea somewhat better in a chat log at collaborative-bookmark.md Google Spaces did some nice work here, but the product was shut down within an year of launch.

🚀Lightspeed for Chrome

Lightspeed is an experimental UI design (not implemented) for Firefox that focuses on making the New Tab page more functional by giving the browser a decent way to search across bookmarks, open tabs, and history.

It is a pretty neat idea (see the video linked above). My first thought on seeing the video was that most of that stuff could be done using the Chrome APIs for Chrome as well. Chrome does offer a way for an extension to override the new tab page, after all.

The discussion on HN is also very good.

Update: There is some progress on the WebExtension porting of Lightspeed, given the recent Firefox updates. With this in place, it should be relatively easier to port the webextension version to Chrome itself.

Update: @tallpants made this: https://github.com/tallpants/lightspeed

Personal Social Media Analytics

WolframAlpha launched a Personal Analytics feature for your facebook data back in 2013. It is no longer accessible, but it generated some stock analytics and boring graphs.

They weren't really that helpful. I'd like an easy query interface that let me "filter" data points, and get back open-data via the Graph API. This means, for eg, getting the most liked music artist among a subset of my friends. The interface I'm thinking of right now is like Gapminder, which allows you to "play" the dataset as it evolves over time.

A recommendation engine built on top of my facebook data is a good idea, I think.

Since the idea is a decade old, it seems everyone has given up on using APIs for this kind of work, and modern incarnations of this idea are all based on data-export-dumps. See the following for example:

API for Workflowy

Workflowy is a cool tool that I use for note-taking. It allows infinitely nested lists with @mention and #hashtag support. One thing it lacks currently is API for me to access my own data. I think workflowy is a great tool that could become a lot better if there were a way for developers to hook into it. (For example using workflowy as a data-backend for a todo-app).

Email on top of keybase (or other social-media-proofs)

Replace Keybase with Keyoxide, Keys.pub, WKD, or rel=pgpkey.

Make it easier to discover encryption keys for users via email plugins that pickup keys from one of the above sources.

  1. Compose an email to [email protected].
  2. Extension pops up: "Hey, I found a key for this email address published under a social proof for twitter/@username as well as on the website username.dev.
  3. If user clicks yes, fetch the key, and use that to encrypt your mail.

Caveats: PGP is pretty terrible, and does not work in practice. It is probably better to just use Signal or Wire or something else.

Once Signal launches usernames, we should find a way to link social-media-proofs to signal usernames instead.

🚀 Newsletters for GitHub

A lot of github project owners would like to send out newsletters to all of their stargazers. However, GitHub doesn't provide anything for that. An easy way would be to integrate StarGazers with MailChimp, making sure that people can unstar a project to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

Only the repo owners and collaborators (maybe) should have access to sending out newsletters. For bonus points, you can replace mailchimp with your own solution.

This could even be monetized slightly for paying off your server costs: newsletter access for projects with >1k stars (the mailers that would cost you money) cost money to the repo owner as well.

So a tiny python package pays nothing to update its users about a new release, but if Angular team wants to send out an update, that gets paid.

And finally, this should automatically subscribe you to any new GitHub releases in any project you have starred. This is a missing feature that I think can be best implemented by a third-party for now.

Update: GitHub now supports watching releases.

There are lots of related projects in this thread: isaacs/github#410

🚀Hacking via OAauth tokens

While pen-testing, once you've gained access to the target, it is often necessary to install a backdoor to mantain the access. While this is easily done in case of root access to the machine, this is not that easy if the target is an email account, lets say.

Many online services today (with data of considerable value) offer developers programmatic access to their data by use of APIs, which are usually authenticated via OAuth tokens. What I intend to build is a suite of applications (or a single large one) that allow you to use the application as another user, just by setting up an access token.

While this is certainly possible with existing tools (such as the Facebook Graph API Explorer), it is cumbersome and not user-friendly. The application will mimic the interface, usability, and looks of the actual application to let you maintain access easily enough.

But OAuth tokens can be revoked

That is a good point, but one that fails in practice. A password change in most services does not trigger an automatic token revocation because that would leave a lot of developers and users unhappy. However, neither does any service warn you to check your approved applications (especially after a hacking attempt).

Procedure

  1. You gain access to someone's account.
  2. You create an application (using a fake account or the victim's own account, so its not tied back to you)
  3. You setup our app (direct deploy to Heroku)
  4. You configure the app with the application credentials (app id, secret key)
  5. You authenticate the victim's account against the app
  6. You use the application to access the user's account

The account access will continue till the victim checks his/her approved applications.

🚀 I made this: https://github.com/captn3m0/amon

Pluggable Notify Daemon for Linux

Not another window manager daemon, because lots of them already exist and there are already good APIs in almost all languages that make it easy to integrate with all of them. However, Linux DEs are still missing an easy way for me to get notifications about the thousands of little different things (such as build notifications).

The idea is to have a simple config where you can connect your bazillian accounts via OAuth, and we will poll all your accounts and give you "clickable" notifications for each of them. (GMail notifications might open your mail client if you click reply)

Keep it pluggable, otherwise its of no use.

🚀Telegram To RSS

This is fairly well solved at this point, see the following:

You can see a archive of the original idea at telegram-to-rss.md.

🎁 Disable Local Fonts Extension

A simple browser extension for web developers that disable local fonts from loading. Alternatively, it raises a grave warning if a web-font was bypassed for a local font. This is helpful if you are a developer:

  • And have some specific font installed locally (say Font Awesome)
  • And are developing a website that uses that font locally
  • And forget to include the Font in your stylesheet

The page continues to function normally in your development setup, but breaks in production.

Based upon this chrome bug request, which asks for this feature.

I came to know about this because of a comment on my "disable-web-fonts" extension, which does the opposite. This might be handy for people who want to make sure that web-fonts are working fine for all users.

Arch Linux Package Build System

The Arch Linux User Repository is great. Except, a lot of packages rely on building-from-source since no binary releases are available. However, the build steps for these packages work very well, resulting in a working build. The idea is to create a AUR build server that takes in a AUR package name as input (it can have a whitelist of such packages), runs it in a docker container, and outputs a generated package file (tar.xz) that can then be directly installed on any machine.

This has some security concerns, mainly how do you trust a binary package an external server built?

Planning to solve this with attempting reproducible builds, and publishing everything. You can audit any build artifact whenever you wish. I'll likely just use the Docker ArchLinux image and build against that.

Moreover, the primary audience for this would be me. I would really like to get packages that can be installed much faster because I don't have to build them. I can just have a script that instead downloads the latest build from the server instead of AUR and then just installs the package instead of building it locally.

Take a look at https://github.com/Foxboron/arch-auto-build, which is a very similar attempt at this idea.

This is already handled by the Arch Build System (albeit without Docker). Using that might be a better idea.

You should also look at the https://github.com/archlinux/rebuilder/ if this looks interesting.

Hacker News Research Bot

A bot that posts paper abstracts and links to PDF whenever a paper referencing a research paper is posted to Hacker News. Most scicomm posts that make it to HN almost always have a primary paper reference, and someone ends up posting the paper abstract along with a link to Arxiv or SciHub usually. A bot that automates this for all HN submissions would be a fun project.

Update: Someone did this! See @randomdrake's comments on HN.

Update 2: The mods are not very happy with the abstract being posted, but the rest should be good.

For Bonus Points: Include a link to the fermat library URL of the paper (if available).

🎁 🚧 Slack Dialer

All of our company has contact numbers added on Slack, but it is cumbersome to find someone's profile on Slack. A simple dialer application that does OAuth-verification on your Slack profile to get a list of the entire organization, and present a simple dialer for all the people who have contact details added.

Interface would be a simple grid of faces, click to dial, sorted by frequency. A simple search-as-you-type box at the top. Can also be done as a PWA to easily make it cross-platform.

Note that this requires a Slack team with a paid account. I'll help you get a trial so you can build this.

🚧 https://github.com/captn3m0/slack-dialer

Database Conversion Toolkit using an ORM

Something that lets you switch your database between SQLite/MySQL/Postgres/... by using an existing ORM framework to import and export out the correct commands.

The grammar differences in most databases are taken care of by an ORM, and the remainder is just switching your ORM to use an existing database as the source of truth. Even a specific variant (say SQLite to MySQL) would be great to have.

Thought of this after spending a lot of time trying to migrate my Grafana/Gitea setups from sqlite to mysql and trying every solution in this SO question.

There are some closed solutions to this, but would like a open-source solution that does this well.

🎁 Tachiyomi Headless

Tachiyomi is a Android application written in Kotlin that scrapes comics from various web sources. A headless version of it would be great to have, replacing projects such as https://github.com/evilhero/mylar with something much more stable.

The end goal is something that works as a "minor" (<200L) patch on top of Tachiyomi, and does a JVM-desktop build which can be run anywhere. A sample README would look something like:

A headless build for [tachiyomi][0] which you can run on your server on a schedule to download comics. This downloads the comics in plain images and then converts them to CBZ format with metadata intact. A new release is generated for every Tachiyomi release.

Get the latest release from the [releases page][1]. Download the tachiyomi-headless.jar file.

Run it as the following:

java -jar tachiyomi-headless -c config.yml

Where the config.yml file looks like:

dir: /home/comics/
format: cbz
# All the tachiyomi extensions come pre-loaded
# https://github.com/inorichi/tachiyomi-extensions
comics:
  - http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Marvel-The-End
  - https://manga-fox.com/one-piece

🚀 OPML Generator

Simple web tool to generate OPML files to let you use RSS feeds everywhere.

I ❤️ RSS because it gives me the control of how to consume and read the content. While many services provide you RSS feeds, they do not give you an easy way to export a list of things that you follow.

For eg: Every repository on GitHub has a releases RSS feed that you can follow. However, you need to follow each one individually. Thankfully, there is a nice spec called OPML which is used to pass around lists of RSS feeds.

What if one could generate a OPML feed for:

  1. Releases of repos that you have starred on GitHub
  2. Authors that you follow on GoodReads
  3. Bands that you follow on BandCamp

🚀 I made a initial working demo recently for the first one, and you can check it at https://opml.bb8.fun. The source code is at https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/opml-gen.

Related: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge (I have contributed a few bridges to this)

🎁 🚧 Bangalore Events List

Similar in scope to http://webuild.sg/ or http://engineers.sg/ but for Bangalore.

  • Want to keep the name generic to support non-tech events as well
  • ICS support (WeBuild.sg/cal for demo) is a must-have
  • (They have a RSS feed as well!)

Domain name suggestions are welcome. Since blr doesn't have a TLD, I was considering using .events.

Initial Work: https://github.com/captn3m0/gardencity.events There is also some work from @tallpants on this at https://github.com/tallpants/meetup2ics/

🚀 Amazon Price Tracker with RSS

There are some nice open source trackers available for Price Tracking Amazon products, but I would like to see something that generated an RSS Feed.

This could be built on top of RSS Bridge fairly easily. Configuration options would include:

  • Min Price (Only add to feed if price is below X)
  • Amazon Country/Domain (Use the specific Amazon website)
  • Item Id

🚀 RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge#741

(While the above is merged, this doesn't correctly work because it doesn't cache the information properly).

OPML Sync

Instead of forcing users to do manual imports of OPML feeds, let them auto-subscribe from feeds using a dynamically generated OPML feed. This is not a product idea by itself, more of a extension idea for existing RSS Readers.

See related discussion on the tt-rss forums.

✨🎁 Sanskari Proxy

A lot of Indian Government websites are inaccessible on the public internet, because they geo-fence it to within Indian Boundaries. I made a list of all Indian Government Websites, and the idea is to make a Indian Proxy service that specifically works only for the Geo-fenced Indian GoI websites.

For eg, if uidai.gov.in is inaccessible, hitting uidai.gov.sanskariproxy.in will get you the same result, proxied via our servers.

This is not intended to be used for actual usage, just research purposes. Will help make the UIDAI (and other GoI) websites accessible to a much larger community.

Update: I made a version of this, the one that comes with the least legal issues.

Helm Charts for Self-Hosting

I self-host a lot of my services, and it would be great to take my existing services, and convert them to compatible Helm Charts that others can re-use. Basically: Helm Charts for Self-Hosting.

The input for these would be the terraform code at https://git.captnemo.in/nemo/nebula

Fake Paytm Payment

A fake webapp that goes fullscreen and does the following:

  1. Has a QR Code Scanner and OCR Scanner that scans Paytm QR Codes
  2. Lets users enters any amount
  3. And gives a green check to say that the payment was successful.

Why: To demonstrate to Paytm that they need to educate their merchants better about authenticating payments.

⚠️ Likely illegal to distribute.

Update: There are already two such apps on the Play Store. However, they don't work any more since they were based on the old UI Scheme. See @Oxyenyos's PR for some more details.

✨ Automated Personal Finance

A personal finance application that tracks things automatically, but saves all data on your systems.

A overwhelmingly large percentage of my finances are online or tracked somewhere digitally. What is ditigal can be automated, but without any of the SMS-sniffing applications that currently clutter the market. The idea is to have a simple cross-platform application that:

  1. Embeds a web-browser that lets you login to various online services.
  2. Scrapes the order/payment history from these sites regularly.
  3. And provides you with monthly budget/finance history that you can use to track your spending.

For bonus points, figure out a way to track card expenditure. The very minimum services required would be:

  1. Uber (Has an API)
  2. Splitwise (Has a API)
  3. Paytm (Doesn't have API, but the website backend is very much a API)
  4. Amazon

I've tried something similar before: captn3m0/gringotts, but I made a few mistakes:

  1. Made it a ruby-command line application.
  2. Made it output YAML.

A few related projects:

If I were to try it again, I'd ensure a few things:

  1. GUI first, with a great UX.
  2. Cross platform, but I'd priritize Mac if necessary.
  3. Save all data in plaintextaccount compatible files. This would let people use other tools on top of this.

CardDAV on Slack

While Slack calls are great, they are not the same as a Contact Entry in your phonebook. Because with a phonebook entry, you can make outbound calls without having internet, and you get contact details when your colleague calls you.

The idea is to run a Slack OAuth based CardDAV server, which:

  1. Authenticates the user over OAuth
  2. Fetches the list of all users in a team
  3. Generates a CardDAV URL for the authenticated user
  4. Which can then be used by the user on their phone to sync Contacts one-way (From Server to Phone)

Why one-way? You don't want changes made on the Client side to be pushed to the server.

Why CardDAV? It is an open-protocol built to exactly solve this problem.

And since you have the user's OAuth tokens, you can verify the token on every request to ensure that it is still valid. If the token is invalid, you return an empty Contact List, thus ensuring that users can't fetch contacts from teams they've left.

Another cool hack this enables is that for teams on Free Plans, which supports "Skype" field in your profile, but not Phone number, it allows you to use the "skype" field to build contact sync which converts the field to a mobile/telephone field as long as it is a valid telephone number.

✨ UPI on Desktop

A clean-room reverse engineered implementation of the NPCI Common Library.

Every UPI-supported app works using the NPCI Common Library, which takes care of some crucial details:

  • MPIN Entry
  • Debit Card Entry for first time registration

Before encrypting those and passing them to the application code.

This project envisions to reverse-engineer the NPCI Common Library. This would let people:

  • Build Desktop implementation of any UPI Application
  • Build BHIM on older devices

This is a necessary step, but not the final step since that would be reversing the web APIs that common UPI apps use.

Twitter Adventure Maker

Play your own Adventure on Twitter threads have gotten quite famous recently:

@ChettyArun was wondering how these were even made with Twitter.

One line pitch: Make a simple webapp that uses the Twitter UI to generate Play your own Adventures. For bonus points, add support for Twine or perhaps DNML to let people create these easily.

🚀 Playstore RSS Feed for Version Updates

An RSS feed to follow updates on applications would be nice. See this issue.

🚀 RSS Bridge now has a Google Play Store Bridge: RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge#2110

Calendar Feed for Event Websites

Would be great if I could open my Calendar application and immediately look at events that are happening around me. Aim is to subscribe to "Fun Events - Bangalore (Insider)" or "Plays in Bengaluru (BookMyShow)" calendars for eg.

Insider has an API that could help with this: https://api.insider.in/home?filterBy=go-out&city=bangalore

SVG to PNG on the Edge

I wanted to generate SVG images based on Social Media sharing templates that could be re-purposed as header images for any of my articles. Such a solution would help bloggers immensely, since your Open Graph images can be easily dynamically generated. Same goes for people with static sites. (Generating a static SVG is much easier than generating PNG images).

If you have a magic box that converts SVG images to PNG images just before serving them to Open Graph scrapers. You can implement such a box using CloudFlare workers for eg.

A few more links on this: [a, [b], [c].

Think of how powerful this could be: <meta property="og:image" content="https://image.sv/g/https://captnemo.in/img/title-banner.svg />

A somewhat relevant thing: https://www.bannerbear.com/. There are more details on #11 if this sounds interesting.

resvg is a library that should fit nicely for this usecase.

NammaBescom OCR/Overlay Bot

A bot that waits for tweets from @NammaBescom, OCRs the image they send, replies with the OCR version of the text, and attaches a map on the tweet with an overlay map of all the areas that lost power in the last 24 hours.

A slightly stale version of this data is available at https://www.bescom.org/upo/public.php in text format.

Credits: https://twitter.com/kingslyj/status/1219697117909803008

🎁 Mars: Terraform Remote HTTP Backend with End-to-End encryption

A fork of https://www.terraform.io/docs/backends/types/http.html, which changes the configuration format to:

terraform {
  backend "mars" {
    address = "https://mars.com/03fa43d6-adbe-4e03-8e25-ffdf8a3e456a"
    encryption_key = "${var.MARS_ENCRYPTION_KEY}"
  }
}

The lock/unlock address can be inferred. The service can be made public as well, since the backend just needs to be a simple/dumb storage for blobs (back it by S3 perhaps?)

Why

  • For casual projects, Terraform Enterprise is too much
  • Separate Infrastructure for Terraform State store makes sense
  • Not everyone has S3 available
  • Just share your UUID and the encryption key with your teammates

Backend

Needs to be a public good with restrictions:

  1. Reasonable Rate limits
  2. File size limits
  3. Restrict by terraform-user-agent, because why not
  4. Block unencrypted data from being stored

Extras

  • This needs to be Highly Available if folks are gonna use it
  • Use NaCl for crypto
  • Support a breakdown into read_encryption_key and write_encryption_key for key rotation
  • The encryption parts can perhaps be merged to upstream

🎁 iOS OPDS File Provider

iOS 11 and above support browsing arbitary "cloud" filesystems using a "File Provider Extension". This allows your application to expose a arbitary directory structure to other applications using the Files app (and file-picker dialogs).

Common use-cases include picking files from Dropbox, GDrive, iCloud etc. Here's a simple tutorial that demonstrates the idea: https://www.raywenderlich.com/697468-ios-file-provider-extension-tutorial.

The idea is to build a simple app that implements a dumb OPDS browser, along with a File Provider Extension. This magically makes all applications on your device OPDS aware, which is a Great Thing ™️

OPDS here is the open publication distribution system, which allows a large number of clients to access digital libraries and publications with mostly-sane distribution and browsing semantics.

As an example, Arxiv has a OPDS server without any authentication. You could enter this one URL in your application settings, and now all Arxiv PDFs are instantly browseable in your Files application.

OPDS support search as well, but I'm not sure of File Provider Extension does, but that would be another cool usecase. The application UI is just 2 screens:

  1. List of connected OPDS Servers
  2. Edit/Add screen for a OPDS Server. Includes fields for URL/Username/Password.

Brownie points for adding support for rendering ebook thumbnails, but that is optional.

iOS/MacOS *sonic File Provider

Similarly, the SubSonic API is decently documented, reversed and re-implemented across a lot of clients. A single application that adds support for SubSonic File Provider will allow any other application to pick song files from a subsonic source. Not as many usecases as picking ebooks or PDFs, but good nonetheless.

collaborative-bookmarking

if you haven't used dropbox folder sync in the past, this is how it works:

you have a parent dropbox director you create subdirectories you pick a subdirectory and you share it with people everyone with access gets the same directory in their dropbox their edits to the directory are synced with yours I'm skipping over conflicts for now take this to bookmarks: everyone has a bookmark thing in their browser chrome has 2 parent directories, though -> bookmarks, and tab bar I add bookmarks and save them in a special directory. I get a share option in the extension against every parent level directory to share with other people

The interface is basically:

If the other person checks their bookmarks directory, they see the same directory and links

edits are synced as well, so you can edit bookmarks (title only) and it gets synced back

There are lots of tools that already sync your browser bookmarks, but once you have the base in place, you can make the "source/sink" configurable to things like Google Save / Pockets / Pinboard etc.

👩‍🔬 Boardgame AI Gym

The idea is a mix of 2 things: reading research papers about Monopoly, and playing a lot of boardgames. There is a lot of good research work around monopoly [0] and certain card games (Poker etc), but modern board games (Catan has a little research community) haven't been looked at much. I wanted to do simulation-based research for modern games, but found that there is no easy tooling available to do this.

CardWorld is "OpenAI Gym for boardgames". The complete idea is:

  1. Have a board game framework in place that allows people to write rulesets for their favorite games. These get registered as environments in the Gym.
  2. Allow anyone to submit a agent script for this environment that plays this game. This could be written in any language that the platform supports.
  3. Have a runner system that runs these agents against each other.

The benefits I can see are these:

  1. Crowdsource AI research on turn-based games. The easier it is to write a bot that plays Hearts, the more people will try their hand at it.
  2. Improve our understanding of Card Game Modelling. There has been some research in this area earlier[1] involving languages specific to model this, but I think there is a lot of scope of improvement here.
  3. Give the boardgame community the tools to simulate and understand strategies for modern board games. Everyone knows you must buy the Transports in Monopoly, but what is the optimum strategy for Settlers of Catan?

Related Projects:

Work so far:

🎁 ✨ Green/Yellow Pages

A distributed directory for spam reports.

I despise [TrueCaller][tc], the current world-leader in this space, because their entire business model depends on users selling their data to Truecaller, which can then make as much money from this database.

When you look at the root problem that truecaller is solving, it is a reverse-yellow-pages directory to avoid spam calls.

To solve this:

  1. You need a way to check a number against a known spam list.
  2. You need the check to be as fast as possible.

If you want to beat TrueCaller, this check should be completely offline, to present a significant advantage.

API

The API has 2 endpoints:

  1. Register a number as spam.
  2. Check a number and get a YES/NO spam response.

Spam registration

To prevent abuse, you want the client to do some proof of work before each submission. Publish a hash of the input number in a ledger.

Data Store

Maintain a layered bloom filter (research) for each of the country-domains. We don't store the original number, though, but the hash of the phone number in the bloom filters.

Check

Any party can request a check by sending us a hash of the phone number (so it doesn't really leak much info) along with the country code. We want a slow hash function but since we want this to be verifiable on the client itself, the ideal would be that it takes ~0.25s on a average mobile device.

Once we recieve the hash, check it against all the bloom filter layers in parallel and return the results as a score.

For eg, if we have 1000 layers (to check upto 1000 reports), return the highest layer number that has an entry for the number.

Ledger

The above-mentioned ledger is an easy way of ensuring verified sync with any other party that wants to maintain the same data store.

This is not a very robust solution, and an ideal solution would be to let the client publish on the ledger, and everyone can just pick up from the ledger.

Different entities can create different directories depending on the client properties. For eg, if a client has reported too many spam reports, you can reduce their contribution.

A generator might also consider the frequency of such reports, along with their age so that recent reports are given more weightage.

The nice thing here is that, since all violations are published on the ledger, you can re-create the directory from the ledger at any time.

Directory

A generated directory is a compressed export of the nth layer of the bloom filter. n here can be decided by the customer. So you can pick n=5, for a high-false-negative rate.

Over time, I expect this to be standardized as high/low/medium.

Application

The application uses a list of country codes (which it can auto-fill from the application context) as input to download directories from various known sources. The remainder of the application is spent on interrupting inbound calls and adding a overlay with the call score.

Security/Privacy concerns

While hashing is the right choice here, it still has issues. A valid phone number may be very small and we are already recording the contry code to reduce the size and improve directory efficiency.

See this for eg, where the actual phone number is just 5 digits.

Even if you use a really slow hash function, and it takes 2 seconds to hash each number, it only takes 37 hrs total-compute time, which can easily be run in parallel to guess any numbers which may have been ever entered in the ledger.

The problem here is that we want repeated numbers to hash to the same value, so as to ensure duplicates get recorded properly.

This might be possible if all clients can store a copy of the entire ledger, but that doesn't sound like a good idea.

However, the mere fact that a phone number is in the ledger isn't as important as when it was added.

A client should ideally add a random delay (to the tune of hours) and batch any writes to the ledger so as to reduce chances of leak.

If A calls B, and B immediately writes A's number to the ledger, A can pretty much guarantee that it was B who did it.

There is a counter-argument here to be made about how you want honest clients and immediate publishing would increase transparency and hopefully get more actual spammers on the list.

Another concern is about publishing the client identifier in the ledger, since it can lead to the network figuring your calling patterns. However, since an entry is only added voluntarily, and doesn't really have any PII, I think it is a reasonable tradeoff to make.

Deregistration

Phone numbers are not people. They can be transferred, and what was a spammy telemarketer earlier could now be your number.

There is no easy way here, other than having a "negative" entry in the ledger, with a far higher cost attached to it.

The client should always whitelist any saved mobile numbers as well.

Another solution is to have a second "verified" ledger of some sort, where people can verify themselves as not-a-spammer by "some means". Not sure how this could be done in a distributed manner though.

Cost of Computation

  • Verification should be fast
  • Insertions should be slow
  • Client registrations should be costly

By costly, I mean the compute price, not monetary. A nice way to equalize this would be to make a registration as hard as 10 insertions, so creating a client and reporting 9 further times would be much more cheaper to do.

This helps in ensuring that there is still a way to counter spam reports. I'm sure there are better ideas, though.

Terms

Directory: The actual data store holding a "Yes/No" filter of whether a number is spammy or not. Ledger: A blockchain or ditributed log that maintains any reports.

References

🎁 communities browser extension

Every community that I meet these days wants to use its own different app to manage things, or alternatively create its own special forum and so on.

For instance:

  • The dev-s community runs its own Slack channel (which is great) but wants its own discussion forum.
  • ReRoll Bangalore has its own WhatsApp/Telegram group (which is great again) but lacks a discussion forum.

The idea is to make a Chrome/Firefox extension that:

  1. lets you create a community (you get a unique id + social links you can give out)
  2. lets others submit their identity to the community tracker via the extension.

The extension has the following features:

  1. Allows you to add "communities" you belong to
  2. Allows you to add your identity handles that you own. So you can specify multiple twitter/reddit/facebook/HN/... accounts that you own
  3. Link communities with your identities. So you can share your reddit handle by joining a community.
  4. Highlight a community member while browsing the site. So if you are browsing hacker news and have added yourselves to the community listing, you can see other discussions highlighted from other members.

The entire extension lives in browser space and localstorage. The backend just maintains a mapping of community id to profile IDs, which is synced once in a while. A community code might be required to add yourselves to the community.

This is like Reddit flairs, but flairs only work on a single subreddit, this is intended to work across various discussion forums.

onioncannon

Similar to pushjet, but with the following idea:

  • Push all app notifications to other clients
  • Add/Remove clients at will
  • All traffic reaches a central server
  • All traffic is encrypted at source, but the uuid of the client can be used to talk to them

Related:

Use Case

  • I wanted to build a simple "auto-type OTP" Chrome Extension.
  • Without using pushbullet (Should be FOSS)
  • Without giving my OTP to anyone else (should be E2E)
  • Without having to worry about NATs and firewalls (should be a publicly hosted service)

Somewhat related to the idea is http://github.com/decant, which allows me to build the "read SMS" part of it.

What I envision is essentially a simple client-registration protocol:

  • [Device A] generates a UUID.
  • [Device B] generates a UUID.
  • B generates a QR code using the UUID.
  • A scans the QR code to get the UUID and pushes a sample event.
  • B gets the event, and can decide to push events to A if needed.

The QR code includes:

  1. The UUID of a client
  2. A public key fingerprint of the PGP key of the client
  3. Metadata containing:
  • Public Key
  • URL where the public key can be found
  • Misc Client Information

Any client who scans this can now start sending encrypted data to the client.

The nice thing is that you can transmit data however between these two parties, once it is encrypted. Use GCM/pusher if you wish.

🚀PyPi Notifier

Problem: No way to get updates when any package I am using has a new release.

Solution:

  • Sends an email when a package you are watching updates
  • Get starred package list from github
  • Webhooks are not possible
  • PyPi -> GitHub mapping is impossible to maintain
  • Parse PyPi RSS Feed
  • Get list of packages updated and mail people
  • Maybe parse package name from setup.py
  • Allow uploading requirements.txt as well perhaps.

Sources

Once it has your GitHub credentials:

  • Starred github repos that are also on PyPi
  • packages menetioned in setup.py and requirements.txt files from my own projects
  • Allow someone to upload a requirements.txt and use that as source
  • Parse the PyPi RSS Feed to get complete updates

All the sources are merged together.

Notifications

  • Maybe have a curated twitter account that tweets about releases for the top 10% packages.
  • Create a personal RSS feed for every user
  • Send out emails (configurable) for every release.
  • Optional direct tweets as well?

🚀 Dependabot, Renovate

codenames-ai

Codenames is a word game, and you can see the rules here: https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf

The interesting challenge in the game is word-association:grinning:

  • finding a single word that
  • relates to one-or-more of words in Set A (Your color)
  • while staying away from words in Set B (Your opponent's color)
  • and staying far far away from a single word in Set C (Assasin)

The remaining AI is much simpler: Given a word and a count,

  • find the closest words from Set (A+B+C)

I think using some clustering algorithms on top of word2vec should give decent results. Maybe GPT-3 can do this much more easily.

Verifiable Code Execution on Cloud

A common problem in the privacy world is that when a service says: we need your data, but promise we won't store it - you have to take them at their word. This is a common problem. Signal for eg, hashes your contacts, and sends them to their cloud servers to see which of your contacts are on Signal. They manage to do that by relying on Intel SGX, which signs the code running on AWS and the Signal app validating that signature to ensure that the code that's processing your contacts isn't doing anything nefarious.

However, there is another trusted piece of infrastructure that can be used to achieve a slightly lower degree of trust. Here's how you do it:

  1. AWS Lambda is "verifiable infrastructure". You can fetch the code and verify that it's the same code as what you've provided elsewhere (as a reproducible build for eg)
  2. We create a lambda for trusted-code-execution (say collecting hashes of your contact list, matching them against a bloom filter). The code isn't supposed to log these contacts, or save them in any way. We also provide this exact code elsewhere, for people to validate and review.
  3. You create a AWS IAM keypair that has permissions to get each revision of the lambda code, validate the corresponding API endpoint against this lambda.
  4. Instead of using a custom-domain API Gateway, you instead use the AWS execute lambda endpoint (The ones that look like https://api-id.execute-api.region.amazonaws.com/STAGE). The request directly reaches the lambda - verifiably (I think).
  5. Publish the keys for the AWS IAM keypair that was created above.

Anyone in the world can then call up the Lambda management API to validate the code at any time with these credentials. If you trust AWS Lambda and IAM, there is a verifiable trust in the code that is running on that lambda and that is processing your contacts. If/when AWS supports Intel SGX on Lambda (or Nitro Enclaves), additional guarantees can be provided by using that.

Lambda could quite possibly be replaced by similar services: Fargate/Cloud Run.

Links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837281, https://stackoverflow.com/a/65798291/368328

Not sure what the actual product here would be. Perhaps a toolkit that makes it easy to setup such infrastructure? Perhaps a global custody chain that acts as verifying nodes?

Browser Extension: youtube-cue

A browser extension of https://github.com/captn3m0/youtube-cue/ would be nice, where you could click a button on the YouTube URL for a video to download a CUE sheet.

Stitch EPUBs from multiple URLs

I wrote https://github.com/captn3m0/pystitcher, which does a great job with declaratively stitching PDFs. It would be nice if something similar could be done for EPUBs. So you create an EPUB by writing down a markdown file:

title: Thunder and Lightning author: Scott Rain summary: Book Summary

# Thunder and Lightning

# [Cover](cover.jpg)

# [Chapter 1: Everything goes south](https://example.com/ch1.html)

# [Chapter 2: Lightning](https://example.com/ch2.html)

Take the input, run it through a readability engine, and generate proper EPUBs out of it.

See some related stuff:

  • I wrote url-to-epub, which works nicely for single-URL books.
  • percollate is a command-line tool that turns web pages into beautifully formatted PDF, EPUB, or HTML files.
  • pandoc, obviously

OpenAPI Specification Generator from HTTP Archives

HAR is a JSON-formatted archive file format for logging of a web browser's interaction with a site. Lots of tools already support HAR format, including Chrome, Firefox, Fiddler, Charles Proxy, ZAP etc. There are JSON schema generators that will take a JSON object and generate a OpenAPI schema accordingly. The usecase is:

  1. Browse around a website or mobile app, which happens to have a JSON API.
  2. Save a HAR file from your browser or proxy.
  3. Generate a OpenAPI Specification file.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but the following can be easily adapted for:

  1. List of various routes
  2. Authentication scheme

I wrote a few reverse-engineered OpenAPI Specifications recently and this would have been helpful.

Edit: Found a few projects:

Open ISIN API

Based on https://github.com/captn3m0/india-isin-data.

A Survey of the Electron Supply Chain

Electron applications are easy to build, but hard to maintain:

  • using npm means the dependency tree is limitless
  • using electron means most applications are static bundles containing:
    • a full chromium runtime
    • a copy of ffmpeg
    • electron
  • Chrome bugfixes take time to reach electron.
  • Older versions of electrons provided a full Node.js environment in the renderer process.

The process model has improved over time, but it's not perfect. There were 3 context isolation bypasses reported in 2020.

A survey of existing applications might be worthwhile to see what's the lag between:

  1. A bug being reported in chrome
  2. A security fix in electron

reaching end users.

I did some work on it:

2fa.wiki

A community maintained machine-readable wiki for information about 2fa recovery workflows for various services. 2FA recovery workflows are often undocumented, so this would be a good thing to document across the internet.

Having this machine-readable will be even better.

Boardgame Rulebook Translation Guide 🚧

Translating technical guides (such as boardgame rulebooks) to Hindi is quite tough. There should be a standard guide that documents common terms so as to avoid confusion between various games using different translations for common boardgaming terms.

Simple Firejail/Bubblewrap wrapper for AUR/NPM/pipx packages

I trust packages in the distro far more than random dependencies. It would be nice to be able to run a command with a prefix so that:

It only gets access to the files and directories mentioned on the command line. Maybe automatically do this at install time, to wrap it.

Probe the Great Indian Firewall

The Great Indian Firewall is what blocks Indian Government websites from being accessed outside of India. This is bad for multiple reasons, including accessibility, archivability, and usability. There's multiple ways this is applied, inculding:

  1. GeoDNS based blocks (DNS resolves to a blocked IP outside India)
  2. IP Address based blocks (Requests from an ASN outside India are dropped)
  3. Block ASNs from Hosting Service Providers

Take an existing corpus of Indian Government websites (such as mine) , and probe it in multiple ways to detect differences between the "normal response" (What you'd get from an Indian residential IP) and a "blocked response" (what you see from outside India). Take care to account for residential v/s cloud IPs, since those are commonly blocked.

The outcome should be a self-updating report/dashboard that documents the various sites that are blocked outside India.

A Practical MRNL Service (Mobile Number Revocation List)

Note: TRAI (India's Telecom Regulator) publishes a Mobile Number Revocation List every month. It consists of any mobile numbers that were disconnected this month. The list is public, and meant to be used by Indian businesses and service providers to protect against account takeovers once these mobile numbers are re-assigned. The list is published in JSON/Excel/PDF formats, and is accessible over an API.

As it stands, each business must write their own code to actually use this list. A usable implementation of this list would be some service that could do one or more of the following:

  1. Publish all revocations on a public queue, such as a publically accessible SNS topic, Amazon EventBridge, or a NATS/Kafka stream. Any business can subscribe to this, and consume it easily.
  2. Let any business subscribe to a webhook where such lists are published.
  3. Let businesses submit their existing customer dataset on a regular basis, so you can provide targeted webhooks to each business - you only get notified if your customer is impacted.
  4. A Bulk-Lookup API that takes an existing customer dataset, intersects it against this month's revocation list and returns a response of impacted customers.
  5. A historic database lookup that takes customer account creation dates along with mobile numbers as input, and returns impacted customers (mobile numbers that have been revoked since the account was created). This is important because a business might already have vulnerable customers

Security and Privacy Considerations

  • You do not want to store a copy of any business's customer database - relevant for (3). Especially do not link it to any identifiable Business Name. Finding a business from the list of mobile numbers might still be trivial however (if you know a subset of users for eg).
  • Support bloom filters for bulk lookup APIs to reduce the request payload.
  • Look at Private Set Intersection to make bulk-lookups completely anonymous (The server learns nothing about your customer dataset).
  • Provide clear guidance as to what guarantees the MRNL provides, and what businesses should be doing after getting notified. This might be very important for 2FA considerations for example, and require complete account suspension in cases where the mobile number is the only customer identifier.

Cost Considerations

  • Running a public SNS/EventBridge/PubSub service with third-party subscribers has a low enough cost, since you're responsible for reasonable egress and publishing costs.
  • Running webhooks at scale does get costly, due to network costs, so don't do this unless you can monetize it.

A physical variable Fuzzy Clock

I don't like the per-minute cadence of modern clocks. Fuzzy clocks reduce the accuracy of time to fix this. I use the Fuzzy Clock on KDE, which is described as:

The fuzzy clock shows the time as a spoken expression like “Twenty to six”. Additionally, the fuzziness of the clock can be adjusted. At maximum accurateness, it will change all five minutes, with increasing fuzziness the time of changes will increase. At maximum fuzziness, it may only say “Weekend”.

I like having accurate clocks at home when I'm getting ready in the morning, but as the day goes by, I would like to care less about accurate time. I'd like my clock to just say "Time to Sleep" beyond 10pm, but during working hours be accurate to 15 minutes or so.

I don't know what a physical version would look like, but it would be cool to come up with one. I am thinking of prototyping something with a e-Ink display.

A curl impersonation proxy

curl-impersonate is a cool project which patches curl to impersonate browser signatures (TLS Cipher Suites, TLS Cipher Order, headers etc). This lets you use curl-enabled code to behave as if the requests came from a browser. It doesn't run JS but is quite helpful for lots of usecases.

A common issue with curl-impersonate is using it in applications which already have a HTTP Adapter, such as Faraday/Ruby or other HTTP clients. You need to switch the client to curl, and then LD_PRELOAD the libcurl from this project.

However, most adapters already support a HTTP Proxy. It would be nice to have a MITM proxy that was curl-impersonate aware, so it becomes a cheap and easy way to run this in your existing codebase.

A Whisper UX Design Pattern

You can "mute" triggers in most platforms, where a trigger could be a hashtag, or a user, or a text pattern. However, the mute is always a binary thing - either you see it, or you don't.

A well-stated problem with muting is the echo-chamber it creates. If you mute all mentions of [political-term] from your feed, it could be the equivalent of putting your head in the sand.

A "Whisper" is a more nuanced version of this - instead of hiding away the mention, it is shown in a different style, or a different color. This way you can still see the mention, but it doesn't dominate your feed.

You could also club posts with the same whisper tag, and show them together in the feed.

I've been considering something like this for https://news.tatooine.club.

Tareeqh pe Tareeqh

A website where you can visualize the pendency status of cases in courts, and see the reasons why court cases are not heard. Give it a date, and your case details - and it can use the existing data to estimate whether your case will be heard or not (and give you probabilities for reasons).

Mobile App Traffic RE Platform

A platform that helps with:

  1. Patching an existing app to support traffic analysis.
  2. Running the app against your network.
  3. Generating HAR files using a proxy
  4. Ingesting the HAR file to generate OpenAPI Specifications
  5. Create appropriate dependency graphs for API calls
  6. Automatically generate OpenAPI Workflows for specific calls

One-Page RSVP Platform on Edge Compute

https://rsvp.ngo/ was almost perfect (doesn't work any more), but I'd like something I can easily run on Edge compute such as Netlify Functions, or Cloudflare Workers. It should be a single page that lets users create events, and submit RSVPs, with a single function that is easily embeddable to an existing website.

One Page Event Hosting platform

Considering building this at host.blr.today: A single page no-login website to help you host an event.

  1. Event Date considerations (Show weather, protests etc)
  2. No login required
  3. Semantic structure with Schema.org/Event
  4. Automatically generate banner images using something like bannerbear
  5. Embeddable RSVP Form
  6. Give a separate Payment Link.

Price Index for Indian Grocery Websites

Pick a basket of common goods from Indian grocery websites, and track the price of these goods over time across multiple popular apps (BigBasket, Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto, Amazon Fresh etc).

Related work:

Bangalore Adblock Art Project

Commercial Hoardings were banned in Bangalore throughout COVID and for quite much later: https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/commercial-hoardings-will-not-be-allowed-in-bengaluru-says-govt-1125535.html

A cool art project would be to showcase the pre-post photos of the same places with and without the hoardings in sight.

PURL Canonicalization

PURL is the Package-URL format, letting systems encode a package (+version) into a URL scheme. However, there are often multiple ways to encode the same resource, such as:

both refer to the same package, with different semantics. This makes matching PURLs quite difficult as two tools might encode the same package in two different ways.

A canonicalization scheme would be helpful.

Nutri-score calcuator

https://github.com/openfoodfacts/robotoff seems pretty close.

Given A nutrition label (and some identifier), as specified by FSSAI, generate a Nutri-score label. Make this into an API, which can cache on the identifier (Vendor+Product ID) and provide a nutri-label.

Then build interesting things on top of this API:

  1. A browser extension that works as you shop online, showing you the nutri-score of the product.
  2. A web-app that takes your Grocery app export data (See https://captnemo.in/personal-finance-stack/), and generates a nutri-score for all items you buy.

There are some apps on the market that rely on barcode -> UPC -> Lookup and are probably reliant on openfoodfacts but there are no good Indian barcode databases (hence the next idea).

If a good Indian barcode database exists, this could be extended to work with that database instead.

Indian Grocery Barcode Database

Barcodes are great, and UPC barcodes are quite decent at being identifiers for products across sellers. Sites like https://www.upcindex.com exist to lookup this data, but they rely on US based listings.

Go through all images across all product listings on Swiggy/Zomato/Zepto/Instamart/BigBasket. Run OCR on these images to extract the barcode, and then provide the associated metadata alongside each barcode. Also include the image URLs.

Submit everything to openfoodfacts.org

showtimes.in

A simple website that shows you the showtimes of all movies playing across India. Easily doable using data from a few sources:

  1. TicketNew, now owned by Zomato
  2. Cinepolis App
  3. PVR App
  4. BookMyShow

https://showtimeapi.com does not support India currently, so it might be worth selling them the data feeds as well. Splitting across 4 different providers gives some redundancy as well. The majority of screens get covered 3 ways via this, however standardising the data might be a problem.

https://www.internationalshowtimes.com/markets says they support India, but I don't know what's the data source they use.

India Automobile Privacy Review

I really wish there was a truly private modern automobile manufacturer in India that used end-to-end encryption for all data that they collected, storing it only on the vehicle (under device-encryption) and synced over E2E to their app/website if needed.

Unfortunately, there is none. The best we can do to raise awareness on the matter is do something akin to Mozilla's Privacy not Included review, where they compared 25 US car companies and found out that none care about privacy.

This is a non-technical project, and quite easily doable by a bunch of policy/legal folks.

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to contribute via Pull Requests, or discuss ideas in Issues. Also feel free to use these ideas in making the Next Big Thing. I promise to send you a postcard if you ship one of these.

License: CC BY 4.0

There is a list of other similar lists-of-ideas at SIMILAR.md