[Ssc-dev] SSCXfer 0.0.1 build

[Nathan of Guardian]

Happy weekend everyone - we bought our first giant Christmas tree here
in Brooklyn, and Eliza is sure excited to start decorating it. However,
before those shenanigans begin, I thought I would push out my progress
from last night.

SSCXfer is my reduction of the Vidiom.mobi (http://vidiom.mobi/) app to
be a focused, clean secure video uploader for YouTube and the
self-hostable videobin.org software. The SSCXfer featureset is part of
the agreed upon SOW for this phase of the SSC project.

Vidiom is pretty fantastic, but is a bit too kitchen sink, and also
included features like FTP and Facebook upload which I don't feel
comfortable putting a "secure" stamp on. The YouTube upload code comes
from the very interesting "YouTube Direct" project's Android client:
http://code.google.com/p/ytd-android/ (Bryan/Sam - we should talk with
Steve at YouTube about YouTube Direct).

The basic user story for SSCXfer is:

"Alice has sensitive video evidence of a human rights crime recorded on
her smartphone and wants to upload it to YouTube, but is in a country
where YouTube is often blocked, and always monitored."

a more complex one is:

"Bob is a trained human rights defender working in a restrictive region,
using his smartphone to interview victims about their experiences, and
he needs to safely offload the videos from his phone to a secure private
site as soon as possible, without raising any flags in the internet
monitor systems."

In this case "secure" and "safe", mean it will 1) use HTTPS as
available, 2) store any local data in SQLCipher, and 3) support upload
over proxy servers, specifically Orbot's built-in SOCKS or HTTP proxy
without requiring root. In addition, the uploader must support low-bw,
high latency connections, and support resumeable uploads. Finally, since
videobin.org can be self-hosted, it is possible that a server could be
run by WITNESS or any organization on a Tor hidden service .onion
address, or at least on their own, https site.

At this point, I've implemented support for Orbot/Tor working by
enabling HTTP proxying support in all the HTTP connection code, and it
is working quite well for both uploads to YouTube and the default
Videobin.org site instance. Resume and retry seem to work, but I have
not done extensive testing. I think the most extreme test scenario is
uploading over Tor over EDGE network, and then going up and down into
the subway. We'll see how we do in that case.

The existing UI model works well enough - it is a list of all video
files found on the device, and an indicator of whether it has been
uploaded or not, and if so, what the remote URL is. This URL can then be
SMS'd, emailed, etc... and will also include the hash of the video for
remote verification on download.

APK Build:
https://github.com/guardianproject/sscxfer/sscxfer-0.0.1-20111211.apk/qr_code

code in master branch up here:
https://github.com/guardianproject/sscxfer

that's all for today!

+n