

Clinkle: App Teardown (Part 1) - ankitshah
http://svstealth.tumblr.com/post/54198052713/clinkle-app-teardown-part-1#

======
volume
1) I'm not familiar with intellectual property law and I'm curious: Can
Clinkle's lawyers do anything to prevent such information from being
published?

2) My inner conspiracy theorist says this is a clever posting from someone
internal to Clinkle as a PR stunt.

~~~
huhtenberg
> 2) a PR stunt

Came here to say just this. This looks very much like an astro-turfing post.

~~~
21echoes
i don't think astroturfing posts are typically this negative..

~~~
huhtenberg
It'd be a better way to astroturf actually. The goal of such post would be to
merely put the company on a map and get people talking about it. Just set in a
mood for now - it's something grand, mysterious and ambitious, if a bit half-
baked (but that's just at the moment, that's why they are in "stealth" mode
after all). The praise singing chorus will step in later.

------
fblp
Continued here: [http://svstealth.tumblr.com/post/54200406550/clinkle-app-
tea...](http://svstealth.tumblr.com/post/54200406550/clinkle-app-teardown-
continued)

This part just mentions design, possible parter logos, fonts, facebook like
boxes and that they didn't obfuscate code.

------
pbreit
Article seems unnecessarily mean.

A $25m "seed" is generally not a good idea but I think worthwhile giving the
benefit of the doubt at this point and waiting to see what and how they roll
out.

The Yodlee thing is likely for verifying bank/card accounts, not offering
Mint-like services.

------
icpmacdo
With android apk's can so see the complete source code of the app?

~~~
conradev
No, but you can disassemble them to see the Dalvik bytecode[1], which is not
too hard to understand.

[1] [http://source.android.com/tech/dalvik/dalvik-
bytecode.html](http://source.android.com/tech/dalvik/dalvik-bytecode.html)

~~~
wellboy
You can actually reverse engineer an entire app to java code and see all the
resources such as strings and images. Just takes around 10 minutes
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3593420/android-
getting-s...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3593420/android-getting-
source-code-from-an-apk-file)

You can prevent this by obfuscating your code in eclipse with proguard,
however most apps are not obfuscated.

~~~
lnanek2
Even with obfuscation you tend to just end up with the code, but all the
identifiers are replaced with a, b, c, etc.. I've still been able to figure
Bluetooth protocols and other things without much trouble. For pirates,
impersonators, and malware creators, they often just have to find
free/pro/goods counter/license check/sig check or add in a call to their own
extra code to run. So a little tougher for them, but not the end.

------
gojomo
Wow... blindly speculating yesterday about what Clinkle might be doing --
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5956736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5956736)
\-- I'd thrown in "ultrasonic acoustics" as a random wild guess. Great to hear
that's part of it.

Though it'd also be kind of cool to do the transaction in the hearable
range... so your phone playing a merchant could make the same sort of
'honking' as old dial-up modems. Not just a novelty, that'd promote the
service to everyone within earshot.

------
bobo13579
This is a worse investment than color in my opinion. The founders have no
track record whatsoever to justify a $25M investment for a product that has
been stealth mode for two years running. I've heard several complaints from
insiders about the company and its founder.

