I've been curious about this. I wanted to build a "Comment on anything" program, but found that it would have to be a browser extension. Iframes can't load most pages, a custom browser is too much friction, and running a proxy is expensive.
So I gave up because I didn't want to write an extension.
Even if you get it working, I'm not clear how you maintain privacy - Loading the whole index from remote is private but expensive. Passing every URL you load to the service is cheap but terrible on privacy.
There are middle grounds like "first 4 letters of a SHA384 of the URL" or bloom filters, but I only skimmed the article and didn't notice which one they're using.
The data is never sent anywhere. It is an RSS reader, it download all the feeds you follow and thus it got the content for those posts saved in memory. It parses all posts for links and saves the links. When you're browsing, it checks the link of the current tab against those links.
How it works is the last section of the blog post.
I've been curious about this. I wanted to build a "Comment on anything" program, but found that it would have to be a browser extension. Iframes can't load most pages, a custom browser is too much friction, and running a proxy is expensive.
So I gave up because I didn't want to write an extension.
Even if you get it working, I'm not clear how you maintain privacy - Loading the whole index from remote is private but expensive. Passing every URL you load to the service is cheap but terrible on privacy.
There are middle grounds like "first 4 letters of a SHA384 of the URL" or bloom filters, but I only skimmed the article and didn't notice which one they're using.
The data is never sent anywhere. It is an RSS reader, it download all the feeds you follow and thus it got the content for those posts saved in memory. It parses all posts for links and saves the links. When you're browsing, it checks the link of the current tab against those links.
How it works is the last section of the blog post.