Show HN: Rushline – Anonymously follow people's private conversations
The Rushline frontpage animation suggests anonymization involves dropping avatars and replacing names, but this actually does very little to ensure anonymity.<p>Everything from geographic hints and topic involvement to word choice and punctuation make a person uniquely identifiable, and the vast assortment of public social networking feeds and blogs is a perfect source for training data.<p>Right now, only state actors and service providers can intercept most private communications. It appears to me that Rushline will only lower the bar such that anyone can do so with a bit of Python.<p>Moreover, I strongly doubt corporations, research institutes, or government agencies would permit secrets to be shared openly on any public communications platform, even with the pretense of anonymity. These organizations would be ideal sources of &quot;insight,&quot; and you won&#x27;t have them.<p>For all the things about which people do want to converse openly, there is IRC, Twitter, Reddit, and so on, but on these platforms, it is at least implicitly understood that anonymity is something users create for themselves.<p>Ultimately, you could have made a pretty GUI on top of existing XMPP infrastructure, and there would almost certainly be no difference in the features provided. What value does Rushline actually deliver?