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Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

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Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#31

Post by nickburns »

alephnerd wrote: post #19
saadn92 wrote: post #16

The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available throug…

> Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser Most browsers do in fact offer that level of granularity, especially for PWA usecases [0]. And from an indicators perspective, having certain capabilities turned off can make it easier to identify and de-anonymize individuals. [0] - https://pwascore.com/

Fingerprint? Yeah. Deanonymize? No.

There's a considerable difference. And doing whatever one can to mitigate the former shouldn't be discouraged by falsely equivocating the latter.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#32

Post by psadauskas »

malfist wrote: post #6
john_strinlai wrote: post #5

> This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number. when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point. (the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")

It's ming boggling just how....cringe... these billionaires that want to run the world are. Makes you wonder if the personas that seek billions are correlated strongly with mental illnesses.

Right? If I had enough money that I could make a serious dent in local or even global poverty without noticing the change in my lifestyle, and I just... chose not to, I have no idea how I could sleep at night.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#33

Post by cl0ckt0wer »

john_strinlai wrote: post #5

> This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number. when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point. (the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")

They've pivoted to good news. It's more absurd.

https://theonion.com/breaking-all-of-world-s-problems-solved...

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#35

Post by nickburns »

graemep wrote: post #25
drnick1 wrote: post #9

You could not pay me to use any of these apps. All of my own devices run some form of Linux (Debian for servers, Arch for desktop/laptop, GrapheneOS on phone). I generally refuse to use non-free software, the main exception being Steam on a dedicated gaming rig. I really don't understand why everything has to be an "app." My phone only has a handful of apps, including two web browsers, through which other things are…

Apps can gather data, and there are lots of things that requires apps now. Edit: I meant apps can gather data.

Can you offer some examples?

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#36

Post by shit_game »

themafia wrote: post #27
saadn92 wrote: post #16

The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available throug…

> access to APIs It's mostly static data. Just publish it under a URL that won't change. Then we could actually cache and archive it.

The APIs in question are client-side iOS and Android APIs. Most of these apps are just WebViews wrapped in spyware, which is the point. It doesn't matter that most of the content is static or already uses browser-native APIs for functionality like forms, gating access to this information behind a surveilance device is the point.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#37

Post by nickburns »

shit_game wrote: post #36
themafia wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> access to APIs It's mostly static data. Just publish it under a URL that won't change. Then we could actually cache and archive it.

The APIs in question are client-side iOS and Android APIs. Most of these apps are just WebViews wrapped in spyware, which is the point. It doesn't matter that most of the content is static or already uses browser-native APIs for functionality like forms, gating access to this information behind a surveilance device is the point.

Very well said.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#38

Post by raincole »

joshstrange wrote: post #8

Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations? I find this site incredibly difficult to read with things re-playing as you scroll up and down and the articles I've read from here are often light on details. The graphics seem very AI-generated (overlapping text and other little issues) which makes me think the whole thing is from an LLM. While this post does have some interesting information, I have t…

It's upvoted because the message is "the administration bad." Which, heuristically, is the correct take most of the time.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

malfist wrote: post #14
sumtechguy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think it is the money that made them terrible. I know all sorts of terrible people that would do the exact same things. The only difference really is they do not have the money to execute on those ideas. Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.

I specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.

> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness

Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.

Re: Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

#40

Post by zdragnar »

saadn92 wrote: post #16

The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available throug…

> And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app

I have worked on several applications where the product managers wanted to make our web app something that could be installed through the app store, because that's how users expect to get apps.

I know people who don't even type search queries or URLs into a browser, they just tell the phone what they want to find and open whatever shows up in a search result.

I've tried pushing back against the native app argument and won once because customers actually reported liking that we had a website instead of an app, and other times because deploying an app through the stores was more work than anyone had time to take on. Otherwise, we would've been deploying through app stores for sure.

Marketing gets plenty of data from google analytics or whatever platform they're using anyway, so neither they nor product managers actually care about the data from native APIs.

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