Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I decompiled the White House's new app

thereallo.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 291 posts

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#141

Post by treykeown »

ddtaylor wrote: post #138
iancarroll wrote: post #23

A bit skeptical of how this article is written as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app and it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article. I've noticed Claude Code is happy to decompile APKs for you but isn't very good at doing reachability analysis or figuring out complex control flows. It will treat completely dead code as important as a co…

I think you should make proper counter arguments instead of dismissing something because they used a specific tool. Ad-HomineLLM is a logical fallacy IMO and adds little value. I would hope eventually HN and other sites add this to the guidelines similar to other claims like vote manipulation etc.

Sorry, making up a word to try and frame distrust of LLM-generated content as a “logical fallacy” is a bad take.

HN doesn’t have guidelines against anti-LLM rhetoric, but it does for LLM-generated comments.

> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#142

Post by iAMkenough »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #136
SoftTalker wrote: post #11

Looks like what you might expect in a standard marketing app from a consultancy. They probably hired someone to develop it, that shop used their standard app architecure which includes location tracking code and the other stuff.

"Visit TrumpRx.gov" Holy crap, the grift never ends! Is he even allowed to do that, use a .gov address to peddle dodgy meds?

Hatch Act won't be enforced until the next administration and next DOJ.

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#143

Post by l2dy »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #137
Gigachad wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is stopped by certificate transparency logs. Your software should refuse to accept a certificate which hasn’t been logged in the transparency logs, and if a rogue CA issues a fraudulent certificate, it will be detected.

I don't believe it's supposed to proactively check the logs as that would inevitably break in the presence of properly configured MITM middleboxes which are present on many (most?) corporate networks. The point of the logs as I understand it is to surface events involving official CAs after the fact.

Clients are supposed to check. For example, Apple requires a varying number of SCTs in order for Safari to trust server certificates. https://support.apple.com/en-us/103214

And yes, it does break MITM use cases, for example on Chrome: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/chrome-android-certificate-tran...

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#144

Post by vdqtp3 »

array_key_first wrote: post #111
wincy wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every default setup on every website and app for the last five or so years has been encouraging users to add pronouns, making it difficult to avoid it, even my iPhone asks me to add each person’s pronouns when I add a new contact. I don’t know why Siri needs to know that, but it’s there. There’s one website I use that won’t let you sign up as a contributor without “completing your profile”, which includes mandatory p…

I would imagine it would be useful in 100% of English-speaking workplaces because all workplaces have the expectation of English communication, which pronouns are essential for. If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun. Inferring pronouns has always been dumb and annoying. Many names don't have obvious pronouns, for example, the name "Taylor". Is that he or she? And clicking t…

> If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.

It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#145

Post by rootusrootus »

periodjet wrote: post #83

[flagged]

> Since when is the government a slick and efficiently run outfit that produces secure and well-done software products? Does no one remember the original Obamacare launch?

Wasn't that written by a private company? Canadian, IIRC.

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#147

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

filoleg wrote: post #46
dijksterhuis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what version are you on? from the iphone app store: version 47.0.1 - minor bug fixes - 34 minutes ago while the parent posted 18 minutes ago they may have patched the location stuff as part of the “minor bug fixes”?

I have the iOS version from yesterday, haven't updated the app yet. No location permission request prompting encountered. In system settings, where each app requesting location data is listed, it isn't present either.

Ah. So another way to say it doesn’t get your location every 4 seconds.

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#149

Post by drnick1 »

> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.

I wouldn't run a non-free government app on my phone, but this seems a positive. It's basically what uBlock does.

Re: I decompiled the White House's new app

#150

Post by goodmythical »

fjdjshsh wrote: post #130
iancarroll wrote: post #23

A bit skeptical of how this article is written as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app and it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article. I've noticed Claude Code is happy to decompile APKs for you but isn't very good at doing reachability analysis or figuring out complex control flows. It will treat completely dead code as important as a co…

>as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Is there something in particular that made you conclude that or are you going just with how it felt? For what it's worth, it didn't seem to me.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN