Aye, had the same thought here. I'd've signed up to check it out. I don't own a mobile... Even if I did, I'd not download an app on spec. WebApp gives an opportunity to sell yourself with no additional buy-in.
If they're looking to capitalise on FB's data revelations, asking to download binaries is the wrong way to go about it. You need a no-commitment approach here.
Banana Republic. Cuba. Let's not pretend the world superpowers don't all do this stuff to advance their position. Russia does it to advance it's national position. China does it to advance it's national position. US does it to advance their corporate position (largely tied to national position, just a vaguely alternative setup of the same stuff).
Tribalism, to feudalism, and any point in between we see the same situations play out. Look at all the empires over the ages. We're all just incrementally advancing the same playbook each time.
I don't have any suggestion as to how this cycle would ever be changed. The only thing that differs is the move makers. The moves all look pretty similar. One nation crumbles, proffers change, wants to avoid repeating/continuing discovered atrocities, another nation/empire is ready to take it's place.
We can call out the atrocities globally as we see them. Try to fight each individual fire. There's no pretending that every nation isn't guilty of trying to advance it's position by any means necessary. Offering the humanitarian excuse as a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" deal is universal. Doing what you can to avoid the aforementioned "calling out".
I'd imagine it'll look similar to how cash is laundered today. It used to be you'd need some tangible real-estate to look at least vaguely legitimate on the surface. However with more big business moving away from the high street, it's easier than ever to spin up a company, slap together a website.
Would be trivial to accept and process these payments.
Another avenue might be some kind of mutual fund. A building society for the grey market. One where your paper trail would tie you to a fund used for illicit goods, but not directly to your particular flavour of illicit good. That'd require a great deal more work though... And comes with the obvious risks.
Final thought there's always replacing cash. After all cash is just paper we all agree has value. If the underground markets can find a similar good with similarly agreed value that might work. I've heard of phone scammers requesting their mark's buy gift cards/vouchers. Presumably they're monetizing the voucher on their end somehow.
The goal of a cashless society seems to be more in line with the even greater transparent creation of money. These "we can track criminal financiers!" soundbytes sound more like the cursory glance reason you'd give the public.
Largely cashless societies recently seem to have either been deeply entrenched in the financial industry, or rife with wider corruption. Both of those will want to continue in a clandestine manner. The law might not apply to the rich, but you can bet you'll be slapped down for not at least trying to hide it. I can't imagine a system cashless or otherwise that didn't have at least some mechanism to move wealth without fanfare.
Finding the balance between searchable and memorable is quite the task. A text editor named Flugurbenhurg is gonna be relatively Google friendly, not quite so grey matter friendly.
I've often had the itch to create tooling to automate tasks. Later deciding to make it more generic and open source it. I have such a time trying to give them names. Internal tooling, fine, just name it what it does and move on. Public releases though... Oy, I'm sweating just thinking about it.
"Finding the balance between searchable and memorable is quite the task."
While I agree, the name Neo is crap, unfortunately.
It's like how many things are named Fuse or Fusion in open source, or new projects that start up with names that are clearly already dominated by something else. It just doesn't work, doesn't do anyone any good in the long run.
It's worth it to go back to the drawing board for a minute, and just come up with a name. Especially since so much thought and care has gone in to the rest of the app so far. Calling it Neo works like an internal project name, just to fill in the blank and get something started. But as a name that can ship, Neo is never going to work.
Unless it does, and becomes the new defacto Neo. Which could happen. But it's a pipe dream. I think it's better to start off on the right foot with a good name.
> So pictures of KKK members killing little black girls would be fine as long as the images were "drawn"?
Depends on the context doesn't it? You'd see things like that in a political comic strip and you'd recognise it as condemning those actions. You might see it in a White Supremacist's distribution and see it as endorsing or encouraging the actions depicted.
The use of comics & visual art to convey disgusting happenings in a publication-wide context has been used for a long time in Western media. The act of drawing the image, the act of publishing the image, I can personally find neither morally reprehensible without taking the wider context into consideration.
I'm also a fairly strong supporter of allowing media I find distasteful to be distributed (I caveat this with as long as the production of the media isn't hurting anyone). Largely because censoring everything doesn't achieve a great deal, just hides those ideas from people who in all liklihood weren't the intended audience. Having folk bring their more 'underground' affiliations into the sunlight sure helps know who to avoid.
I've seen it many times where I'll be vetting a new employee or supplier, see their Facebook profile, and be genuinely appalled by the stuff they're sharing and supporting. Do I think that free mode of 'speech' should be shut down? Pfft, no, gave me a glowing indicator not to deal with this person without having to go through the trouble of dealing with them first and realizing it to be a mistake.
