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#glasses#app#something#don#why#better#sure#more#https#zuckoff
Discussion (191 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses
Why would I want a bluetooth scanner to phone home? Seems untrustworthy. Nearby Glasses wins from a data safety perspective.
and so I leave this comment as off topic, but, is it pretty easy to get your new app to appear in that ad slot, above the main contender?
____coders don't even bother to vibe-code, they don't have a clue that there might be a better solution /s
Twice.
"ZuckOff" is a better quality marketing name for an app like this, vibecoded or not.
The media and already consumers have talked more about "ZuckOff" than "Nearby Glasses" so a winner has already been chosen.
Between something opensource and trusted, and a proprietary potential backdoor that can send the data back to the Zuck himself you'd probably want to choose the former (cause you never know with closed sources).
I'm glad that he has shared the link as for me it's definitely useful. It's not a competition and I don't care what media talk, that's not about money.
Outside of that, this project giving scary warnings is something I cannot recommend to others.
> Between something opensource and trusted and proprietary backdoor that can send the data back to the Zuck himself you'd probably want to choose the former.
Only HN veterans care about this, not people in the real world.
Decided by whom?
This feels like astroturfing. The amount of new users recommending and hyping this proprietary product seems odd.
(something as simple as a product name)... is enough to make someone ignore the actual point about software trust and instead argue that good marketing is what's important :)
If you see something that is popular but you think it is worse, then your better/worse axis is not aligned with the majority.
And it is not about being first here. ZuckOff is just a better packaged app, that's why it took off.
> Do you really think popular = automatically better?
If it gets the point effectively across better than the original.
Yes.
It is more supported than something that is OSS that will die in under a year.
There are features that ZuckOff has that are more useful than the suggested one IMO.
For a vibecoded app, it is well packaged with a great name.
That is how you get people to use your app.
We are going to have the organic label soon on apps with this mindset..AI assisted development is evolving by the day and at the rate most apps will be built that way..
You are equating manual coding with more thinking, which has proven to be not the case given that it is mostly automated.
...which refers to the song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_Plans_for_Nigel; the most well-known person called Nigel in the UK currently being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage .
It was an amazing book.
BTW, I will also recommend 'a hero of our time' by Lermontov. In it, you will get an updated view of what the meaning of 'friends' will be. :)
EDIT: since this is getting upvotes, I will also mention that Lermontov is a descendant of the Learmonts, who were British folk.
Also, the book is small but it's jampacked with a lot of wisdom--street and abstract both-- and presented using a language that shines with poetry, it shines even through translation (Penguin Classics trans. is best).
This comment box is too small to contain the story.
* The Quantum Thief
* The Fractal Prince
* The Causal Angel
Actually, most of the story is on his WikiPedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi
The 1st 2 are independent, I recommened people stop after 2nd book
As digital dystopias go, this is one of the worst I've seen; the episode ending with this happening to the protagonist shook me to the core.
> Logs every Bluetooth device it hears, glasses or not
How much AGI is required before LLMs stop putting totally irrelevant technical details into marketing copy?
> Nothing leaves your phone and there is no account.
This is good to know, but it's the exact type of thing Claude is obsessed with putting everywhere once you tell it NOT to do something. For example, if I tell it to commit but never push changes to GitHub, it can't help but leave "Changes committed; nothing was pushed." to EVERY SINGLE MESSAGE. The model just can't help but report back about everything it's NOT doing, and it drives me crazy.
Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
Rendering security cameras useless for identifying any criminals?
Maybe some of these commenters aren’t old enough to remember when fighting for your right to take photographs and videos in public places was one of the frequent topics in online places like Slashdot and BoingBoing. There have been waves of attempts to restrict freedoms to take photos in many countries. When they pass there’s a significant loss of personal rights and freedoms.
> Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
Do you really want this? An off-button for all cameras nearby? Please purchase your official photographs from the gift shop or from the $5 Photo Booth.
This would be a dream for bad people who don’t want to be recorded or photographed doing something, like a bad police officer. Just keep a device around that broadcasts the “do not record at this venue” signal and you can shut down recordings all around.
There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).
Nobody who loves Disney songs would listen to them while also hearing police officers shouting, etc.
There's no human to appeal to in social media platforms. It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything. It means nothing if you're technically in the legal right: the platforms are risk-averse and don't care about your false positive.
This has never once prevented a DMCA notice from being issued, and I'm sure you can guess how easy it is to get a person at YouTube to review your appeal
that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.
Think about it some more. It's all fun and games, until same technology is used against you. There was literally a Black Mirror episode about this very thing.
It would make sure no websites track you.
Yes, let's keep coming with more of these great ideas.
To cut this short: the whole overall idea is just universal DRM writ large. A big, principled no fucking way, ever from me.
But what about the personal privacy / venue rights ...
That's a social problem, it should not be used as excuse to give unilateral control over other people's technology to groups or individuals with special interests.
The idea was for concert venues display these on-stage to block smartphones from filming (and redirect users to iTunes purchases instead IIRC)
Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list. Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.
Sounds a lot worse. The possible applications of this alone are infinitely more scary than perverts filming others without their consent.
This is THE nightmare scenario. Think about it for a second and you’ll see why.
Not sure why you think social norms are positive. Negative amoral behaviors can become norms. I'd argue the west has tons of amoral behavior that is normalized.
Explains a lot about why people vote for racist and right wing parties.
(Yes, example chosen for its reputation for indifferent enforcement.)
We want a society that does not need these workarounds.
The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.
Naming and shaming requires names.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
If we have to come up with a technological solution to grant anonymity when people are filming, criminals can use it.
If we as a society don't go around filming everyone all the time, we don't need that technical solution available, so we can film the criminals when they are doing something criminal.
I never knew why the paparazzi could harass celebrities and a few decades later we are all being secretly filmed for a Meta perv database.
Incrementally, apathetically and often to gleeful offerings of tinfoil hats to those who pointed out previous steps and extrapolated them forth.
> Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.
> (…) The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. (…) Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re... or https://archive.is/65Fze
And if there's no dynamic political environment or fitting concerns to steal focus at hand, we'll sure as hell fund their creation.
Despite the pearl-clutching in this thread, filming rando strangers without consent has always been legal and socially accepted.
It's the prospect of being filmed frequently, and especially in more intimate situations than walking down the street, that is making people uneasy. Flock cameras agitate us because of the frequency of their use. Recording glasses enable the off-the-street problem.
So, you might sometimes know that someone might be recording?
I don't want to dismiss that as useless, but that is a difficult signal to incorporate into behavior.
Instead of Copilot for Counter Spying, or Anti-Creeper.NET.
I scrolled down. Only the newsletter and contact info at the bottom. Do I have to email them? I scrolled up. Just a list of features and description of what it does, but not how do I use it. What's the first step? Please for the love of God.
I see a big blue button that links to "the shop". Oh, maybe that's where I buy it? No it's just "merch". I'm not sure why some random piece of tech would be offering tote bags for $28 (!) but okay.
I go back to the website and keep hunting. Then I see a row of buttons squeezed in a random location, seemingly out of place, like the designer had a stroke at this point in the process. They don't match the visual style of the rest of the site, so they are easy to just ignore as clutter. One says (in very tiny letters) "download on the app store".
Oh, the hypocrisy
the demo video really looks ai generated — several weird artifacts, but what bugs me the most is that at the end the alleged glasses-wearer goes through two men between whom clearly there is no space for a third person.
Eta: and in their demo video there's a person walking by who's face doesn't get blurred lmao. Bang up job, Claude
I would bet my money that there's a dozen lawyers at work, right now, in Meta's HQ, to get a sense of what options they have to harass, shut down, or do something else to the creator of this app. And I would also bet that Zuck is furious about it.
Zuckerberg takes things personally. It's his entire history
... if you can find him, you can hire him, and restore privacy and sanity to your apps. he is ... the ZuckOff dev.-
I don’t post them anywhere (except occasionally to friends or family in direct messages).
I fly club gliders and can’t really attach a camera easily. And in any case the PoV is a useful learning tool. I can check I was doing lookout properly, I can see the instruments clearly and so forth.
I have a second pair of normal glasses that I always swap to when I’m back on the ground.
The shouting match is being loudly won by people decrying the technology however, people can receive physical and verbal abuse on the streets for wearing them which is pretty scary.
> Flags camera glasses by their manufacturer signature <
How is this guaranteed to be not spoofed?
The other direction is trickier. You'd have to modify the firmware of the smart glasses to set a different mac, or at least gain arbitrary code execution with hardware access on the glasses. That's well beyond what the average smart glass user will do
And at that point, it'd be mostly about the heads-up display anyways. Somebody who is determined to record you without your knowledge has far easier paths available to them. Just get one of those lighters or ear-rings or car key fobs with built-in camera
I have "Hey Siri!" enthousiasts visiting soon. They can leave their iPhones in a nice Faraday cage at the entrance.
He says, deeply immersed in big tech without even realising it.
>Quiet is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is
Is such claudespeak it’s not even annoying it’s just funny at this point