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How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

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Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#191
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly these days, have the same thought every time you write a comment on Slack or Teams.

elaborate? was there some specific case?

No, just that there's no reason that your instant messages can't be used against you, and in some organisations, regulations mean that the chat history has to be logged and kept.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#192

I don't know why but Facebook is the one tech company that I just can't have a good opinion about. I like and dislike Google, Microsoft, Apple, NvidiA, AMD, Intel and the rest for different things but I just hate Facebook. I closed my facebook account about 10-11 years back put a filter to keep facebook out of my search results. And I have to say it works I rarely see anything about Facebook on my Google news feeds e…

> I still use WhatsApp though as that is the biggest communication app outside China in Asia This is still contributing to their monopoly. WhatsApp's monopoly is growing and they've even blatantly started to copy the competition: Telegram. Disagreeing publicly does nothing if I'm the one empowering my opposition in the first place.

> Disagreeing publicly does nothing if I'm the one empowering my opposition in the first place.

Of course it does. It does spread the word. That’s important.

You can be an activist and have a real life. You can despise Meta but have acquaintances on WhatsApp you can’t or don’t want to move. You can be an anticapitalist and still agree to join a group of friends inviting you to McDonalds. You can be an ecologist and have a car because you live somewhere without car free infrastructures.

You have the right to be critical of your own life while still acknowledging you can’t control everything.

Having WhatsApp may be wrong for you but it may be less wrong than leaving your friends groups.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#193
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still use WhatsApp though as that is the biggest communication app outside China in Asia This is still contributing to their monopoly. WhatsApp's monopoly is growing and they've even blatantly started to copy the competition: Telegram. Disagreeing publicly does nothing if I'm the one empowering my opposition in the first place.

> Disagreeing publicly does nothing if I'm the one empowering my opposition in the first place. Of course it does. It does spread the word. That’s important. You can be an activist and have a real life. You can despise Meta but have acquaintances on WhatsApp you can’t or don’t want to move. You can be an anticapitalist and still agree to join a group of friends inviting you to McDonalds. You can be an ecologist and h…

> Having WhatsApp may be wrong for you but it may be less wrong than leaving your friends groups.

If friends can't install another app to talk to you, maybe they don't really wanna keep in touch.

When I moved to Telegram I told family and friends where I'd be and they all installed Telegram and actually liked it so they stayed.

It's been 3 years now and I haven't touched WhatsApp.

My words have no value if I can't even follow them. Cognitive dissonance comes cheap, but we can all try to be a bit better than that.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about this with friends the other night. If you've been in the industry long enough, you've probably been party to creating something horrible. It takes a while for the reality of horribleness to crack the glamour of creation and monetary reward, but once it does, everyone I personally know has quit and lived with the regret. I know people who have worked for adtech, gambling and HFT industries who now…

Due to an incarcerated family member, I had to deal with privately run prison telecom software, which was as awful and exploitative as you would expect, I could see where someone might feel guilty for working in this area. Evil business model. But one of the worst things about the software was all the bugs. Silent failures so we couldn't tell what was happening, if it was a software problem or if our loved one was be…

The software on those "Temu" quality Android tablets they sell in prison is the worst I've ever encountered. And I've never seen an update of any note in the years they have been running them. If there is even a dev anywhere that could fix a bug and deploy it...

Anyone know the best way to pull an image off a locked-down Android tablet? I have a prison tablet here and I want to see what is inside the APKs.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#195
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the writeup isn’t omitting anything, you’re mixing things up, which this article explicitly called out. This article is about Onavo Protect[1], “Free VPN + Data Manager”, which was not paying anyone. There was a separate program where Facebook paid teenagers money to install their Facebook Research VPN through their enterprise distribution channel, bypassing the App Store and its rules, so that paid version was e…

Why do people work on such projects? I mean specifically the engineers. You're still paid the same engineer salary, except now you expose yourself to criminal prosecution. The corpo is at least getting some extra returns for the risk, you as an engineer are not. So dumb.

When I was in the music biz I pushed back hard against DRM. I lost, but being on the inside I could swing the needle to the least restrictive DRM as possible (e.g. it let you burn a CD for instance). Most of the other devs I worked with would have simply taken the ultra-restrictive spec, coded it and gone home happy each night. (I did code some shitty ActiveX object for Sony to put on one of their unrippable CDs though... it let you download a DRM-hobbled version of the song)

I can count on one hand though the number of devs I've worked with that saw coding as anything more than a 9-5 grind and would have spoken up if asked to do something shady.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#196
post #104
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A piece of advice I've taken to heart is whenever I'm sending something in writing, to think about how I would feel if I needed to repeat the same things in court or if I found those messages in the news. Not that I've ever said anything near that egregious but it still helps.

More importantly these days, have the same thought every time you write a comment on Slack or Teams.

And this is exactly why so many of the larger companies are embracing either more ephemeral messaging modes or outright deleting history.

https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2024/01/26/feds-warn-compani...

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people work on such projects? I mean specifically the engineers. You're still paid the same engineer salary, except now you expose yourself to criminal prosecution. The corpo is at least getting some extra returns for the risk, you as an engineer are not. So dumb.

Maybe you're on H1B and if you get let go you have to go back to Sri Lanka, whose government collapsed 2 years ago and left the country in political disarray. Some people have better choices than others. Like I wouldn't work on this project, but I have US citizenship. In college I slept over at some of my Indian friends' apartments and often they had like 8-12 guys sleeping in one bedroom, it was just a bunch of matt…

Your scenario describes real people, but Facebook was not built by vulnerable visa holders.

Facebook hired and retained engineers over its entire company history by offering enormous amounts of stock. They successfully demonstrated there are a lot of engineers willing to build unethical products when offered 2-3x their previous salary.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to an incarcerated family member, I had to deal with privately run prison telecom software, which was as awful and exploitative as you would expect, I could see where someone might feel guilty for working in this area. Evil business model. But one of the worst things about the software was all the bugs. Silent failures so we couldn't tell what was happening, if it was a software problem or if our loved one was be…

The software on those "Temu" quality Android tablets they sell in prison is the worst I've ever encountered. And I've never seen an update of any note in the years they have been running them. If there is even a dev anywhere that could fix a bug and deploy it... Anyone know the best way to pull an image off a locked-down Android tablet? I have a prison tablet here and I want to see what is inside the APKs.

adb pull com.whatever will get you the apks which I think you don't need root for, but there isn't a way to just dd the whole image off, afaik.

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#199
post #88
post #4

The email snippets are impressive on multiple levels, mainly how fucking stupid/arrogant people at FB must be. Openly talking about MITM, and then getting multiple other companies to include this kit in their products as well is just beyond stupid for putting in writing. "Hey Zuck, I have an idea on your proposal. We should get together to discuss in person" would be suspect, but at least it's not incriminating. It's…

A piece of advice I've taken to heart is whenever I'm sending something in writing, to think about how I would feel if I needed to repeat the same things in court or if I found those messages in the news. Not that I've ever said anything near that egregious but it still helps.

"Did you see Brian's hat? He's still fucking wearing it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2k-BNySLI

Re: How did Facebook intercept their competitor's encrypted mobile app traffic?

#200
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A piece of advice I've taken to heart is whenever I'm sending something in writing, to think about how I would feel if I needed to repeat the same things in court or if I found those messages in the news. Not that I've ever said anything near that egregious but it still helps.

"Did you see Brian's hat? He's still fucking wearing it." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2k-BNySLI

Don't do the voice
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