This is awesome! I love CloudFlare's services and I'd trust them to provide a really secure, fast VPN (free to boot!)
1. Is there a public endpoint for boringtun/noise? For playing with
2. Any chance the client (desktop) will be open source? Would love to help if possible.
3. Any interest in a WebRTC (and webRequestBlocking) based chrome extension/client?
That would probably not need anything special installed on desktops and would be awesome
Google merely prevents you from collecting information about the IP address & device. It still lets you know who opened the email. Since the request comes from Google's servers instead of the client device (or browser) you get whatever HTTP headers google thinks are appropriate (and of course the IP address of a Google server)
AFAIK Google does not pre-load images (for example, even if no one opened the email Google could request the image). This would destroy open tracking since you'd get a lot of false positives.
Since "who" opened is already encoded in the image URL, you still get this info.
Anyhew, there's a lot more people do with these tracking images - for example see KickDynamic.com. You can change the image at time of open (to say reflect the user's location, which you deduce from the IP). This can't be done if it's gmail, since you don't have the client's IP.
It's kind of strange that Apple doesn't block (or anonymise) images though they're so hot about privacy at the moment.
It looks like Chromebooks are a very popular format and I think an ARM based 'AirBook' could compete in that space.
Napkin Math
MacBook Air current generation (mid-2013) retail price: $999 ($1099 for 13″ model with same CPU).
Intel Core i5-4250U, Tray: $315, http://ark.intel.com/products/75028/
(sure Apple will be getting large discounts on this, but it can't be that large, since $INTC has ~60% gross margin overall)
Apple A7, Tray: $20 (estimated)
Intel Atom E3827, Tray: $41
Tray = 1000 pcs;
The Core i5 has a 15W TDP; 1.3 Ghz clock (turbo to 2.6Ghz); 2 cores, 4 threads. Sunspider 250ms.
The Apple A7 has a 2W TDP; 1.3Ghz clock; 2 cores, 2 threads. Sunspider 397 ms.
It’s not looking all that different! Esp. when you take into account that the A8 will be twice as fast (think Tegra K1) – i.e – a Sunspider score of 200ms maybe?