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How to Bypass WhatsApp Web's Locked Chat Feature

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21–30 of 34 posts

Re: How to Bypass WhatsApp Web's Locked Chat Feature

#21
post #5

Semi-related: On the old F1 website, they'd post the lap and sector times of drivers during an F1 session (practice, qualifying, race). First it was a Java app which had all the data, and then they got fancy and wrote it in JavaScript, and enshittified it: if you don't subscribe to their premium... website offering?.. you just get colored sectors whenever the driver's finished that sector (yellow as they've passed it…

Almost the same thing happens on one of the famous online guitar tab playing things and there's a little userscript that "fixes" it.

Re: How to Bypass WhatsApp Web's Locked Chat Feature

#22
post #9
post #5

Semi-related: On the old F1 website, they'd post the lap and sector times of drivers during an F1 session (practice, qualifying, race). First it was a Java app which had all the data, and then they got fancy and wrote it in JavaScript, and enshittified it: if you don't subscribe to their premium... website offering?.. you just get colored sectors whenever the driver's finished that sector (yellow as they've passed it…

It’s always good to take a look, many things are decided on the client side, and developer tools are part of the browsers anyway. The other day I wanted to make reservations for a service to send my luggage from the airport to my house in Japan, and the form was giving me errors. Searching for the error string around I realized there was a timeout set on the client side, so I increased it and could slowly but smoothl…

A major ISP's "outage check" feature sends all the data back client-side for the actual outage ticket, including circuit IDs, dispatch status, and if the outage is valid for customer credit. I now just hit that API as needed to check when shit goes sideways.

Meanwhile, if you put your ZIP in you just get a little friendly "We're working on it! :)".

I love data firehoses like that.

Re: How to Bypass WhatsApp Web's Locked Chat Feature

#23
post #16

It is a good reminder for front-end devs that security-through-obscurity is not sufficient. It never has. Reminds me of a security company that claimed they could force a watermark onto any content in their web-front-end. Turns out it was a canvas overlay you could just simple delete from the HTML. LOL.

I used a tool in school that outputted svgs with watermarks. So I proved that if I ever wanted to, though I never needed to, I could just delete that element. Trivial.

Re: How to Bypass WhatsApp Web's Locked Chat Feature

#24
post #5

Semi-related: On the old F1 website, they'd post the lap and sector times of drivers during an F1 session (practice, qualifying, race). First it was a Java app which had all the data, and then they got fancy and wrote it in JavaScript, and enshittified it: if you don't subscribe to their premium... website offering?.. you just get colored sectors whenever the driver's finished that sector (yellow as they've passed it…

https://f1-dash.com/

Re: How to Bypass WhatsApp Web's Locked Chat Feature

#25
A lot of WhatsApp's features are enforced client-side, which means on Web they just break with DevTools.

I've done some research into this (haven't published it) but also can't get Facebook's bug bounty report tool to work (whenever I create a facebook account it gets autobanned) so I haven't been able to report them either. I wonder if stuff like this would be eligible, I don't see why it wouldn't.

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