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We're a small team with limited resources, JS is the easiest medium to get started and ship MVP. Until we have native apps for most popular platforms, you have

by simi_ 11y ago

We're a small team with limited resources, JS is the easiest medium to get started and ship MVP. Until we have native apps for most popular platforms, you have two options: (1) run the web client on your own machine, and use Lavaboom this way - if you trust your own computer, of course (2) install a Chrome/Firefox extension to have some proof that the code is the same as the one at github.com/lavab/web - this is still WIP on our end Signed native binaries are the best solution IMHO, we're aiming to get there for most major platforms, as I said.

tptacek 11y ago
How does (2) actually work, given that almost any content element loaded onto the page can override what's in the .js file?
- simi_ 11y ago
  > proof that the code is the same as the one at github.com/lavab/web Theoretically we can prove (via Chrome packaged apps, for example) that the code running on Lavaboom's servers (or locally if you run the web app yourself) is from our public repos. If the code doesn't do magic stuff like dynamically changing itself, and since we use TLS to deliver it, it should be impossible to maliciously alter what's running on the client side, unless we leverage some hypothetical unknown-yet browser-specific vulnerabilities(?). Also, network activity can be monitored, theoretically the users will be able to detect ~if~ when we start streaming their data to NSA servers. Unless you assume our server is completely compromised and we do the streaming ourselves. By the way, that's why I designed the system with the premise that we ourselves can't be trusted (e.g. haxorz pwnd us etc.) i.e. asymmetric encryption everywhere. Here's for instance some of my actual data (ignore the pre-refactoring messiness): https://gist.github.com/andreis/70c8f5bb1d811f6ac7db https://gist.github.com/andreis/70c8f5bb1d811f6ac7db PS: I'm not saying a web app are ideal for what we do, as I mentioned in another comment we started with it due to sheer pragmatism, and we're planning native apps (or at the very least cordova/electron "native" apps). I would really appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

by simi_ 11y ago

tptacek 11y ago

How does (2) actually work, given that almost any content element loaded onto the page can override what's in the .js file?

simi_ 11y ago
> proof that the code is the same as the one at github.com/lavab/web Theoretically we can prove (via Chrome packaged apps, for example) that the code running on Lavaboom's servers (or locally if you run the web app yourself) is from our public repos. If the code doesn't do magic stuff like dynamically changing itself, and since we use TLS to deliver it, it should be impossible to maliciously alter what's running on the client side, unless we leverage some hypothetical unknown-yet browser-specific vulnerabilities(?). Also, network activity can be monitored, theoretically the users will be able to detect ~if~ when we start streaming their data to NSA servers. Unless you assume our server is completely compromised and we do the streaming ourselves. By the way, that's why I designed the system with the premise that we ourselves can't be trusted (e.g. haxorz pwnd us etc.) i.e. asymmetric encryption everywhere. Here's for instance some of my actual data (ignore the pre-refactoring messiness): https://gist.github.com/andreis/70c8f5bb1d811f6ac7db https://gist.github.com/andreis/70c8f5bb1d811f6ac7db PS: I'm not saying a web app are ideal for what we do, as I mentioned in another comment we started with it due to sheer pragmatism, and we're planning native apps (or at the very least cordova/electron "native" apps). I would really appreciate your thoughts on the matter.