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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?
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
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
You can turn off the spam you get via MSN by setting your client to only allow messages from people on your buddy list. You're still notified when people add you to their list (and can choose to add them), but strangers not on your list can't harass you. This feature is available in Trillian, Windows Messenger, Kopete, and I *believe* Gaim (not 100% sure though).
Check the privacy options.
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
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
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...
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?