Hotspots for Obama (or Romney)

by OJKoukaz • 14 years ago

61 47 14 years ago

bengl3rt3• 14 years ago

I would love for Barack to win, but this is just dirty. Who's going to pay for web advertising anymore if any malicious DNS in the middle just feels entitled to hijack them for its own purposes?

OJKoukaz2• 14 years ago

I wouldn't consider it a hijacking. You're opting in.

bengl3rt3• 14 years ago

On behalf of everyone who uses your router which, depending on where your router is, might be rather a lot of people.

bacon_blood2• 14 years ago

Who's going to pay for web advertising anymore if just anybody can install a browser extension able to block ads? We should boycott Firefox.

What kind of world is this where I can't fund companies by learning about the best kind of paper towels or being retargeted about a product I already bought?

I recently saw an interesting thought about the state of piracy, and it being a symptom of a flawed business model. What's to say advertising in its current state is the future of Internet business models?

If enough users don't want to see the current kind of ads, don't they become far less effective?

bengl3rt3• 14 years ago

My issue with it is that it's silent. Unless there is some landing page that tells every new MAC address once "Listen, some content is being replaced", they are SILENTLY manipulating peoples' web traffic and presenting it as canonical. That rubs me the wrong way.

PanMan• 14 years ago

How does this work? They have an android app. I guess that connects to your router to change your DNS. (which then resolves their IP for some ad hosts). But how does it set their DNS in your router? Is there a standard API for that? Or did they make a scraper-app for lots of routers?

MartinCron2• 14 years ago

I'm not going to pass judgment on the ethics or usefulness of this app, so I thought I would try some constructive criticism.

1. The top-right page curl to switch between Romney and Obama has mismatched alt-text.

2. Instead of being partisan, maybe you would want a "HotspotsForAmerica" that would just remind people to vote for the candidate of their choice, instead of telling people who they should vote for.

blafro• 14 years ago

>I'm not going to pass judgment on the ethics or usefulness of this app... >2. Instead of being partisan, maybe you would want a >"HotspotsForAmerica" that would just remind people to vote >for the candidate of their choice, instead of telling people >who they should vote for.

I'm not going to criticize this comment but ...

MartinCron2• 14 years ago

I was contrasting my feedback with the "this is a horrible thing to do" comments that popped up before mine. But, yeah, point taken.

beatpanda2• 14 years ago

Add Jill Stein please.

beatpanda2• 14 years ago

And given the political character of HN probably a lot of people here are voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate.

pilom• 14 years ago

Socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and vowed to stop the drone killings. The only reason not to vote for him is the whole "3rd party" thing (not that that will stop me).

tmarthal• 14 years ago

Is there a geolocation map of all of the hotspots that have supported either candidate? I would assume that would be more interesting than the configuration to a lot of people.

mindslight3• 14 years ago

Why is everybody expending so much effort to support the Obama+Romney campaign? Isn't it pretty clear that they're going to win?

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

The "they're identical" meme flies in the face of reality. Compare Antonin Scalia with Sonya Sotomayor and tell me Obama and Romney don't have significant differences that'll affect the country as a whole.

pkulak2• 14 years ago

Or Keynes and Hayek.

clarkm• 14 years ago

I often hear people use this argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Won't the Justices just wait until a President of their preferred ideology is in power before retiring?

Justice Ginsburg is only 79 -- both John Paul Stevens and Oliver Wendell Holmes retired when they were 90.

Edit: It looks like Ginsburg has expressed her desire to retire at 82 (in 2015), so unless she changes her mind, it will matter.

mindslight3• 14 years ago

Did I say they are identical? Of course they aren't. But one has to be quite out of touch, immature, or just content with corruption to think that expressing a preference for one set of these lesser differences is worth supporting their overriding commonalities.

brown9-22• 14 years ago

This seems more like a play at the advertising revenue rather than an altruistic way to support Candidate A or B.

lukifer• 14 years ago

This is the tackiest possible way to do this (who hasn't already seen every political ad 50 times?), not to mention the extreme inpropriety of asking for a user's router password.

Far easier, and more tasteful: rename your SSID. It's the digital equivalent of a sign on your lawn.

jlees• 14 years ago

On first read I thought this implied it would add Obamads to my browsing experience, but looking more deeply, it just replaces other ads with Obama. Neat idea.

nostromo2• 14 years ago

I like HackerNews to be a supportive environment for startups, but this raises some questions.

Publishers trying to make an honest buck will dislike this. So will cafe customers that just want coffee and wifi and not your political positions, and the privacy conscious who now have their browsing data being sent off to an anonymous third party.

And that's putting the security question aside. (If these guys got hacked, they could very easily harvest your bank and email passwords; I'd be more trusting if they're weren't also using an anonymous whois proxy.)

The best businesses find win-wins (Airbnb is good for travelers and real-estate owners) -- but I only see one win here.

Edit: If this company ends up expanding available public wifi hotspots by rewriting some ads and providing some revenue back to the wifi provider, that could be a win-win for customers and cafes and could be a real hit.

OJKoukaz2• 14 years ago

Couldn't the argument be made that Airbnb is bad for hotels and landlords though? If it's my wireless network, shouldn't I have the right to dictate what gets broadcast on it? You don't have to connect to it.

guelo• 14 years ago

> Publishers trying to make an honest buck will dislike this.

Publishers most likely won't know this is happening.

> Cafe customers that just want coffee and wifi and not your political convictions will dislike this.

It is up to the cafe owner whether they want to do this, or whether they want to put a political sign on their windows for that matter.

> The privacy conscious who now have their browsing data being sent off to an anonymous third party will dislike this.

All advertising networks sends browsing data to third parties. Whether it is this one or some other one doesn't seem that big a deal.

rlt32• 14 years ago

>It is up to the cafe owner whether they want to do this, or whether they want to put a political sign on their windows for that matter.

His point wasn't about whether or not the owners could or could not support a candidate, it was whether or not they should support a candidate.

You're absolutely right, it is up to the owners. And this seems to be pretty cool. But most coffee shop owners (which seems to be the target) will not want to alienate part of their already small group of customers.

lincolnq• 14 years ago

If these guys got hacked, they could very easily harvest your bank and email passwords.

I don't think so, because secure sites will use SSL, and your browser does certificate verification.

nostromo2• 14 years ago

Sometimes yes, HSTS sites would be harder to crack.

However, many people still manually enter website urls (citibank.com) which redirects to https. If the DNS points citibank.com to a fake citibank phishing site, they simply wouldn't redirect to an https site at all.

Very savvy customers may notice that they aren't connected vis https; most people wouldn't.

ck2• 14 years ago

If you change your vote based on a hotspot name, I'd like to ask you not to vote.

Or drive or be around children for that matter - because you are dangerously ignorant.

Hotspots for Obama (or Romney)

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