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Trepia: A Buddy List Of Strangers
An anonymous reader writes "Trepia has released an IM client that automatically populates itself with people who happen to be around you. Something that has been done before by Apple with iChat, but Trepia claims to be 'iChat on crack' in this article featuring the software. This could have potentially revolutionary social effects..."
WTF? You mean that 19 year old stripper is my retired next door neighbor Frank?
FP? ;) ...
No, but seriously: at the moment I'm already getting irritated by the increasing amount of spam I receive via MSN (using Trillian & GAIM), so what might happen with this innovative product? Don't get me wrong, I love to get to know new people, but I'm a bit sceptic if this wouldn't attract a lot of "noise"
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Kind of an interesting idea though. Although I can already imagine the pedos listing N'Sync and Lizzie McGuire as their "interests"...
"But Mom, he was my "buddy"..."
Trepia link missing from article
http://www.trepia.com/
Or click here
-Kefabi
To joining a gym to meet people who are interested in staying in shape, joining a book club to meet people who are interested in books, joining a tiddly winks club to meet people (OK sad individuals) interested in tiddly winks?
Life is a lot more fun if you actually get out there and live it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yeah, works very well...i'm in Cincinati, OH and it's giving me people in Washington and California. Maybe there's just no one on it except those ten people.
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
Ok... say a peadophile says that he is a '12 year old boy who likes sports' or similar... bingo... there's his list of boys in his area...
Bad, bad idea.
This could have potentially revolutionary social effects..."
Japan and Korea have had pagers and phones that do this for some time now, and outside of an increase in accidental meetings at the mall, society has moved right along w/narry a related blip.
Besides, when the x-wife gets within striking distance of my wallet, the hair goes up on the back of my neck, and I doubt I'm the only one with this kind of proximity alert. No news here....move along.
In the interests of transparency and honesty I would set my interests as "hot chicks who like getting naked on cam".
Hmmm.
They can just create an ADD ON for ICQ or AIM.
Spider out the locations... People who want to use it will need to put their own location.
If people don't want to use it, then people don't want it... And then no one needs to invest in your failure of an idea.
God spoke to me
Like with any new technology one has not only got to ask what it can do for you but also what it can do against you. Though the possibilities of this Idea seem very charming for personal use there come up some questions:
Isn't your stored profile a great way to track your movement? As well for "law enforcement" as for "clean his house of everything thats expensive" people?
Won't the marketing guys just love to know, you are close to one of their shops and a young man? As you obviously using a computer you must be the target audience for Viagra.
Like with every new network technology one has to be aware of what informations he gives out to almost everyone interested. Only having the advantages and the disadvantages in mind you can make a good decision on wether you want to use that software or not.
Nils
Okay, just clicked on my own link, and downloaded the program.
Got about 30 people on my list, 4 girls, 26 guys, little less than half with pictures.
The list slowly gets bigger, as Trepia "finds" people close to me. Not a single one was in the same town as me, though a few were about 30-45 minute drives away.
Apparently, the program uses your ip address and prolly trace to figure out how "close" you are to someone. I got a few people who are all the way across the US from me.
It also claims that if you're on a 802.11b network, it'll automatically find other people on the same network as you, that might be running Trepia as well.
Seems like a cool idea, but so far there needs to be way more people using it if you want to find someone down the street with it.
I see that we share the same interests! Fast cars! ....would you like to buy me a Corvette?
How about sharing that pizza you just bought? Can I sell you some magazine subscriptions? Would you like to see a vacuum cleaner demonstration? Can I interest you in some stocks and bonds? Do you want to lose weight while sleeping? Were you born with a too small unit? Do you need your lawn mowed? Can you give me ride to work? Can you give me a job? Can you give me money?
When a company claims being "on crack" as a major advantage, I think it's clear that the US war on drugs has failed miserably.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
To all the ladies on Trepia who are about to be inundated with indecent propositions from me and my fellow slashdot geeks; I apologize in advance.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
I just downloaded it, registered, looked around it for a little bit and then uninstalled it.
Does that make me anti-social?
When I walk outside I rarely ever get excited or even mildly interested in the fact that numerous other people are in my vicinity. In fact the trend in highly populated cities is to ignore your neighbors.
I think that it was Cliff Stoll who said that computers make us disconnect from our neighbors and families. This software facilitates a society where everyone knows each other without actually having met.
I can imagine a cafe with several people chatting, only every one of them is looking into his/her computer screen utterly oblivious that they are chatting with the person beside them.
"Software for shy people - We make you new friends... so YOU don't have to!"
Rant over and out. I have to answer someone on IRC...
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
If only the girls you'll meet with this software would look like this screenshot at Trepia.com. I subscribed to Match.com once. I know better. :)
i have no way of removing people off of my list.
and isn't it the idea to get people who are close to me? i'm in burnaby bc and i was getting people in ohio, california, new zealand... nobody at least within my own country. it was also making this god awful takka takka takka noise while doing it.
"hi where are you from? are you physically near me?"
"i doubt it, where are you?"
"burnaby, bc"
"yeah definitely in the area.. new zealand LOL!"
i'm doubting this program does anything at all, just kind of pretends it does.
If you notice, the installer obviously uses nullsoft's NSIS, but they recompiled it, and changed the banner at the bottom to "Trepia, Inc.". Isn't that a breech of GPL or whatever license NSIS is out under?
Efren Belizario
headspeak.com
What's the average amount of rainfall in this area? Median income? Most popular car? Hippest nightclub? Closest park? Nearest bathroom? Closest 24-36-24 blonde with a love of C templates?
The range of applications in this field is _huge_. Almost all of the pieces are here (GPS, ipv6, web services, wireless), we just need to fit them together.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I don't think its hit a single person within 250 miles of me and im smack in the center of the damn US.
I think I found your problem...
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
It's an early version and i'm sure they have plans for tweaks and improvments in the UI, but from what i've seen this is a serious step in the right direction. After being on for 5 minutes I unlike some people here already started talking to a fellow college student from my area, and am seeing a few people trickle in nearer to me. Also you have to realize that up until now this IM has recieved almost NO press and therefore has a small user base, if we spread the word then eventually it will propagate out and there will be plenty of locals on we can talk to. 2 things: 1)I'm sorry for all the women (the 2 i've seen anyway) who are going to have to endure the neverending popups, so guys please be tasteful and mellow, otherwise this'll be a boys club and where's the fun in that ;>
2) There really needs to be a way to turn off that damn drippy sound!
Geeks of the world UNITE!
connection dialogue box says: "You are currently not connected to the Internet. Please take the appropriate steps and try again."
Welp, that was a short lived experiment. I guess they need to do a bit of work on their network code. Odd, in that it's supposedly an intelligent networking application.
In the website of Trepia, it is mentioned "Trepia(TM) is free to use and contains no spyware or ads." But you know what: Jawed Karim, one the authors mentioned in the article, wrote another piece of code called MP3 Voyeur. Now, in MP3 Voyeur, which searches for MP3s and other media files within LANs, there is a feature that connect to his personal web server every time it was run. If it could not connect to the server, it would refuse to run! Now, coming from such an author, this tool looks a bit suspicious.
So, someone might want to fire up Ethereal and sniff those packets flying from your machines.
The idea is sound, but the implementation is flawed. I mainly seem to get people in the US, even though I'm in the UK (6000+ miles is hardly close) and nobody on the list is in my country even though my friend about a mile away has it installed and running.
In my experience, trying to guess where people are by their IP address doesn't work very well. It would work much better if you could simply add the locations you are at most often by country/postcode or even just grid reference and it used those instead. Even people on the same subnet as me could be hundreds of miles away if they're dialling in. If people have sold of or subleased blocks of IP addresses to other countries, the records could even indicate the wrong location or wrong country anyway - so it may always think I'm in Finland when actually I'm in England... I'm not impressed.
I wrote an IM client myself which simply discovered people on the same subnet using broadcasts - and even that seemed to be more effective at finding my friends and colleagues than this (admittedly broadcasts don't usually work on public networks).
Nick...
you evil people
/.'ed their registration server
you've
how am i supposed to find that good looking girl next door now, huh?
I got some data off the wire, here is what I made of it after about 10 min of observation:
... series of <M> ...
... in a series, variations of <b> = 1,2 ...
outgoing message:
<F><a>4181</a><b>testing out</b></F>
incoming message:
<Q><a>4181</a><b>gorgonzola</b></Q>
outgoing message:
<F>
<a>4181</a> remote uid
<b>testing out</b> message
</F>
incoming message:
<Q>
<a>4181</a> remote uid
<b>gorgonzola</b> message
</Q>
incoming member update? [0x0A between each element]
<M>
<a>4141</a> member id
<b>1054626160</b> timestamp
<c>2</c></M>
variations of <c> = 1,2
??
<N>
<a>4141</a> remote uid
</N>
login:
<C>
<a>xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx</a> my MAC
<b1>xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx</b1> my default gateway's MAC
<c>my login</c>
<d>my password, MD5'd and probably salted. 32 bytes</d>
<e>2.0</e> version?
</C>
???:
<L>
<a>0</a>
<b>1054630291</b> timestamp?
<c>2</c>
</L>
request profile?:
<D>
<a>1498</a>
<b>1</b>
</D>
1=full, 2=partial?
profile:
<O>
<a>1498</a> member id
<p>missouri</p> location
<b>1044120269</b> login time?
<d>xxxxx</d> login
<m>99</m> age
<n>F</n> sex
<g>xxx</g> first name
<h>xxxl</h> last name
<o>wardriver</o> profile data
<e>xxxx@xxxx.com</e> email
<i></i>
<j>xxxxx</j> AIM
<k></k>
<l></l>
<f>http://xxxxxxx.org</f> homepage
<r>usa</r>
<s>mo</s> state
<t></t> city
<u></u> languages?
<v></v> school?
<w></w> company?
<q></q> base64 encoded image (not always present)
</O>
So now people will be able to get to know other people in the same physical place with them.
Truly revolutionary!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
how am i supposed to find that good looking girl next door now, huh?
Umm, go next door and knock on the door???
Bizarre Concept, I know, but try it
Burma?
And, as if it wouldn't be enough, they also claim ownership of all materials you send through their application. Don't discuss your ideas on their chat - you give ownership to Trepia!
The quoted text was found under Help->About. And did I mention that their proximity algorithm sucks duck?What you say is true, but it doesn't necessarily contradict what the previous poster is saying.
The good liars can fool you, yes, but the bad ones are far less likely too, even online, so once you meet them in person, you're where someone who meets another at a bar, with the exception that you've already eliminated the easy to spot wastes of time.
Your statement that "online it's massively simple to social engineer" is only true if someone relies on another to be 100% honest about themselves, something which is dangerous to do both online and off.
I would say that both you and the previous poster are correct on some points, but the net effect is that there are equal, but different, dangers and benefits to both online and offline meeting of people early in any relationship.
1054626160 timestamp
Yep, looks like it (time from the Unix epoch).
1054630291 timestamp?
Don't think so... depends on when you grabbed this capture, but I'd say it's more likely to be a session timeout of some kind.
1044120269 login time?
This is approximately 121 days prior to the two previous times, so I'd say not. Build time of the binary?
Since this is basically an IM crossed with a personals site, let's make it useful:
- A profile that's separated into individual interests that you can search on, or at least individual keywords
- Option to list only members of your preferred gender, a certain age group, sexual orientation, etc.
- A "hot-or-not" rating where, to be fair, you can only vote if you allow others to vote on you
- The ability to FORGET YOUR PASSWORD WHEN YOU DISCONNECT. For gods' sake, how about some basic security here?
balloon, just what I need, my IM populating itself with people I have to ignore. It is hard enough with a OLD ICQ account...Next will be a client with a feature that shares all your info with the national consumer agency so they can find you a friend :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I met my current GF online. Spent a couple days making sure she could write complete sentences, was mostly sane, had friends, etc, then went on a date and did things the old fashioned way from there.
Can people lie to you online? Sure - but they can't lie about being crappy writers, they can't lie about having dumb political opinions, or not knowing who the President is, having never read a book exceeding 100 pages in length, or not being able to think. Smart people can pretend to be someone else, but dumb people will always be dumb.
And you can eliminate lots and lots of dumb people in a very short amount of time in an online environment.
paintball
I just tried your IM program
First off, I want to say your method of locating people "near" me is clearly using a definition of "near" with which I am not familiar. While in the cosmic sense, the UK is a stone's throw from the US East coast, it's not what I had in mind when I read your ad copy.
Second, you desperately need code with which to block users, or at the very least their pics.
In five minutes of use, I was presented with two people using the main pic from goatse.cx as their pic, and while censoring pics is not practical, I would have loved to right click on the image and "Block images from this user," "Block this user's pic," or best of all "Block this user completely."
Third, it really is a mind numbingly primitive IM program. Aside from the alleged location technology it has no features to separate it from the pack.
Chat is little more than what I saw in the VAX "talk" program back in my college days.
The fact that it stores your password and can't be dissuaded form doing so is a major security issue.
It has no user search feature, even for finding things as rudimentary as the user name of someone you already talked to in the past.
I could go on, but it would be tiresome.
To be perfectly blunt, my ex girlfriend coded together a more advanced IM program while completing a free "Learn to program in networked Java" course she downloaded off the web. I'm not joking and I'm not exaggerating.
Next time, try asking users for some geographic location data, like their city and state or their ZIP code.
And by the way, using the IP address as a way of accurately locating users is dicey at best. I recommend your developers look through the web for more information. You'll find you've already set yourselves up for failure.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA