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LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

engineering.linkedin.com

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Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#121

Post by cpg »

zaroth wrote: post #75

I don't think I've ever gagged quite like that while reading a technical article describing a "neat hack". At first I'm thinking, oh, I wonder how they convinced Apple to let them use some private APIs, and then... curiosity turns to revulsion as soon as I saw that proxy diagram. Good god... LinkedIn MITM IMAP. That is truly terrifying. How would you even go about installing that on the user's phone? Oh, that's in th…

I tend to agree that no sane person with minimal technical knowledge would balk at this.

I already know that Yahoo! sells the email addresses of the people I exchange even one email with to LinkedIn and I am repulsed by this. LI then turns around and offers them as connections. I should note I am always logged out from LI to prevent even more evil from them. LI is just evil and should be eradicated.

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#122

Post by buckbova »

vdaniuk wrote: post #87
nostromo wrote: post #54

This is a truly awesome hack. Good job! The value for LinkedIn to vacuum up my email is immense! They'll know everyone I email and the content of the emails as well. They'll know where I shop and what I purchase. If I send a private email to a friend who has this installed, I've now unknowingly bcc'ed LinkedIn. Not only that, but they know this for the entire history of my email account! The person I stopped emailing…

Thanks for this comment, nostromo. You've managed to address privacy problems with the Linkedin Intro while praising the technical solution. This is a great example of constructive criticism that I, for one, would like to see more on HN. Constant raging decreases the efficiency of knowledge transfer and community building. Maybe one such comment / thread would be enough to significantly increase quality of a discussi…

My sarcasm processing engine had a coredump. I have no idea who is sincere anymore in this thread. Please turn on sarcasm tags so I should know whether to agree/disagree, be pissed, etc.

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#125

Post by dingaling »

alexdevkar wrote: post #105
staunch wrote: post #64

Not only does it obliterate users' security but it introduces a potentially unreliable point of failure. Sometimes the hack is worse than the problem it solves. I hope they're being extremely upfront with users about how this works, not that most users will really understand the implications...

Good point re point of failure. If LinkedIn doesn't put a lot of resources into the proxy servers, mail delivery could be very slow or fail completely. I"m still impressed with the creativity from a technical standpoint.

I'm not overly impressed by the architecture; it's basically a de luxe version of the IMAP push-proxies that were common in the early 2000s, such as Nokia Mail ( I think it was called ).

Phone Same problem; all your lovely lovely communications flowing through the Proxy. And your tasty credentials, too.

LinkedIn have taken the old pattern and injected some data at the Proxy point, enriched from their databases.

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#127

Post by notahacker »

baddox wrote: post #89
pisarzp wrote: post #63

I'd be really surprised if Apple will let them use all of these hacks for long... Still great way to get full access to all email from many users.

Which parts would Apple have an issue with? The proxy server is the only part I can think of. Using images, CSS, and iframes in Mail is presumably a very deliberate feature.

Apple has blocked apps for a lot less than providing a feature that intercepts users' email and email password to circumvent Apple's own sandboxing and inject content into their mailbox...

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#128

Post by wslh »

When we first built Rapportive for Gmail, people thought that we were crazy — writing a browser extension that modified the Gmail page on the fly, effectively writing an application inside someone else’s application! But it turned out to be a great success, and many others have since followed our footsteps and written browser extensions for Gmail.

The author is being a bit arrogant, there are more complex stuff that modifying gmail on the fly (remember greasemonkey?).

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#129

Post by ceejayoz »

adamb0mb1 wrote: post #52

This is cool. I'm a little concerned that what they've done expose some security holes in the iPhone mail client. And, all of this work will be for naught when Apples fixes those. (Specifically, iframes in emails have been stripped from most modern email clients for years)

Yeah, I'm pretty shocked that iframes work at all.

Spammers could very, very easily abuse this. Send a valid-looking e-mail, then swap out the iframe content with something spammy once they've all been delivered.

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