Alternatives
Products that do what PubKey – Communicate Privately in Anonymous Public Spaces does
A little while back I remember seeing a user on a certain anonymous imageboard asking for an invite to a selective email host. Only after a few minutes did the guy realize the perplexity of the situation. How do you insure against a race condition in a public forum with no way to direct message? Luckily, he nabbed the invite code, but it got me thinking about using PGP to provide a solution. This is meant to be a rough PoC and the UX is definitely not ready for the average Joe, but the functionality I'd like to think is there. What catbox.moe is to dropbox is what I'd like this to eventually…
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Hi HN, I wrote a custom SSH server in Go, give it a try. It uses your terminal user and SSH keys to authenticate implicitly. Instead of getting a shell, you get an IRC-style chatroom with everyone else. $ ssh chat.shazow.net If you're getting "Permission denied (publickey)", please use ssh-keygen to create a keypair. Instructions here: https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys/ SSH is a really cool protocol; it's a lot like HTTP2. This is a demo of one thing you can do with it, but I plan to factor out the code into libraries that will let you build all…
2014
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OP here. I built this because I recently caught myself almost pasting a block of logs containing AWS keys into Claude. The Problem: I need the reasoning capabilities of cloud models (GPT/Claude/Gemini), but I can't trust myself not to accidentally leak PII or secrets. The Solution: A Chrome extension that acts as a local middleware. It intercepts the prompt and runs a local BERT model (via a Python FastAPI backend) to scrub names, emails, and keys before the request leaves the browser. A few notes up front (to set expectations clearly): Everything runs 100% locally. Regex detection…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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2018 · maskmail.net
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I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
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This project has been kicking around in my head since I first heard about the webauthn PRF extension in early 2024. I've slowly chipped away at it since, and finally got things to a shareable state over the summer thanks to a very fun parental leave. Headed back to work tomorrow, so I figure there's no time like the present. tldr: A client-held encryption key derived during passkey authentication encrypts all sensitive user data prior to persistence so that only the user is able to decrypt and reuse that data on their device. This allows short-lived, privacy-preserving age proofs to be…
18d ago · loginwithone.com
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Hi HN :) really excited to share this with you. The one thing AI reliably does is generate noise. Half the tools I see launch are just machines for producing more noise across more channels. And people are starting to see this in the form of emails in their inboxes as spam filters are struggling. There used to be a useful signal in email: the effort a sender put into customizing a message was a rough proxy for how relevant it actually was. AI killed that. Now it's customized slop with the appearance of effort with none of the cost. It is painful that the open internet / open channels…
Jul 2026 · captchainbox.com
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Needed this in my own work, anonymizing PII/PHI and decided to build this because presidio didn't really cut it for our use-case. Try it and maybe let me know if you have any feedback :)
2025 · github.com
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Phispr is an ephemeral chat application designed for anonymous, temporary conversations that vanish without a trace. Built with Go, it offers both web and terminal user interfaces. A weekend project exploded into a two weeks project, and with a funny origin. https://github.com/bnkamalesh/phispr/blob/main/docs/genesis....
2025 · phispr.space
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Hi, everyone. Been playing around with this recently as a sort of PGP successor. It's not all there yet, and I know it's missing some things from PGP, but I figured why not get a start and see what kind of interest/support it might get. https://stamp-protocol.github.io/ Effectively, this is a key management system that allows building and signing ("stamping") various claims about yourself and about others. The eventual goal is to create easy-to-use implementations of the protocol that allow logging in to websites or managing cryptographic keys for various…
2021
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Hi Everyone, Today I'm proud to announce the upcoming launch of Postcard. You can visit the launch page here - http://www.postcardsocial.net However, since this is Hacker News, I thought the community might be more interested in my blog entry which explains in detail why the project should be of interest to developers including information about the open API Protocol it will adhere to. You can read the blog entry here - http://blog.postcardsocial.net/introducing-postcard/ Feedback is welcome and appreciated. I'm actively looking for beta testers and you can sign…
2013
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Hello. I made this project as an experiment in using key cryptography for user identity in a client server model, and for some future peer to peer projects that I am working on. I am looking for feedback, please let me know what you think. Also, Merry Christmas to HN! :-)
2022 · github.com
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I have just launched a project that has been sitting on my hard drive 80% finished for the better part of a year. http://www.chatroulettespy.com It detects your 'anonymous' chat partner's IP address and performs a geolocation lookup on it to show the user the partner's approximate location on a map. I know the Chatroulette fad has peaked a long time ago (when I started this project), but there are still many people using it and its many clones. It was important for me to follow through on this one and not let it die on my hard drive like many projects before. I would appreciate any feedback…
2011
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Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…
2015
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2015 · vanitykeys.io
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