frasierman

Different guy.

The question I'd like to pose (and it's something I have a hard time with answering myself):

Would you prefer that the government watches your Google searches, your forum postings, your Facebook messages, and your emails and potentially stops these terrorist attacks, or would you prefer to be free of government spying and possibly give up safety?

If another Boston Bombing happened and it was later found out that the terrorists had bought pressure cookers, nails, and other bomb-making materials on Amazon, wouldn't there be outrage that it didn't raise any red flags? Yet when the government tries to investigate potential threats like the one explained in the article, they're seen as bad guys.

I think the real problem is that we were never asked. 9/11 happened and the war on terror began. Americans never chose to be spied on in order to prevent attacks, it was just assumed that we valued our safety more than our privacy.

So when I read about NSA spying articles, or blog posts like this, I always have to ask myself "what if these really were terrorists?" because I know that there are hundreds or even thousands of lives saved through operations like this, and we never hear about the successes.

Just spitballing here, but couldn't you just remove the hardcoded URLs and let users paste in the Snapchat URL so they'd be breaking the TOS, not you?

Technically, it wouldn't be utilizing their API, it would just be a PHP library for accessing APIs that happen to use their exact API call structure.

I know it's a long shot, and it may not hold up, but I think it's better than just taking it down.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't this been there for a while? I know classmates who have been mortified when they find out that who they Snapchat with is public.

Maybe I'm missing something... if Twilio's going rate is $0.01/message, wouldn't it make better financial sense to sit down and just build this yourself? It's not like it requires a bunch of infrastructure...

I'm 55 exactly. ([redacted] on Twitter).

I don't consider myself influential to alot of people, but there are a few.

I found it a bit weird that they never asked for my email, they just assumed that my Gmail account was my email.

I didn't even think about AWS... someone should put together an article on how to set them up... I'd be happy to launch some instances for the cause

I think I saw a comment somewhere about your IP being banned after an hour... anything we should do to avoid this? I'd hate to be scanning for 15 minutes only to be banned and not be able to help anymore.

Well, maybe... If the police were to work with the postal service, they could find the originating post office.

Then again, they could more or less do this now, and they don't.

Thanks!

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to prevent human error without everyone having barcode sticker printers, which seems extremely unlikely.

I totally see where you're coming from, but since the system is mostly automated (as far as I can tell), it'd be just as easy for them to grab from a DB than to try and parse out an adress and postage.

I didn't really start mailing things until the last 3-4 years, so I must admit that I don't know how the system worked previously.

While I agree that it wouldn't be immediately adopted, I don't think it would require too much work on their end to make it work. It's probably naive, and I don't fully understand the system now, so I may be totally wrong, but this was just my idea.