341–350 of 446 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're working on being able to use it without a phone number, though doing so in a privacy-friendly way is forcing them to overcome some challenges first: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1281353119369097217
Phone numbers are an awful identifier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just had to check this; the Android app has "Request account info" and specifically mentions "which you can access or port to another app". As much as I'm happy to pile on Google, Facebook and WhatsApp, this appears to be untrue.
It also specifically mentions that doesn't contain all the messages, and takes up to 3 days. You can export individual chats as texts, but not all the attachments, metadata, etc - and you have to specifically select each one. The statement that "Facebook gives an unencrypted copy of your chat database to Google but will not give it to you" is true; I'm referring to the SQLite database. You can back it up locally, but…
Recently I was trying to switch my wife away from the free Keeper app to the one I use and backup to our own storage, they make it impossible to get your passwords without paying them or rooting your phone. I hand copied them one by one from her old to new phone. Honestly, screw any company that does this.
The most popular apps on one of the most popular operating systems just plainly don't even open. What has this industry become? How are we so goddamn inept at writing software? This is an industry where we can automate testing - not many other industries have this capability - and we still don't have a simple test regime of "check if the app opens" for any of those apps. Somehow, at the most valuable software compani…
The apps are broken serverside by Facebook. No amount of testing (automated or not) on the side of the app developers would have prevented this. Facebook's own apps did not break since they are on the latest version of FBSDK. What Facebook needs to do is to test whether their changes don't break other people's apps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So an app (which you control), is told to load a shared library, and there's no way to handle that? Even by delaying the loading to only when it'll be used?
It's not "is told", it is "it is writen in the binary itself that the kernel/libc runtime should load the shared library".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that we as in industry and we as citizens of free nations do not end these operations, terminate their corporate charters and throw the responsible in jail is indicator #1 that freedom (not the GOP free-dumb) as we know it is in it's death rattle.
So yes the definition of “freedom” is “give the government more power over both app developers who voluntarily integrate the SDK and users who voluntarily download the app”.
I don't remember apps listing the SDKs they use. As a humble user, how do I voluntarily choose whether to download an app or not based on their usage of Facebook's garbage?
Edit: You can't have it both ways. You can't remove a bunch of power and information from the user in the name of "safety" and "UX" and then claim that users are making a bunch of choices they can't possibly be informed about "voluntarily"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there is: a remote kill switch that prevents the third party SDK from loading. That puts you back in control of the software you’re shipping. Fool me once, and all that.
You have to be technically competent enough to know how to dynamically load a framework, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So yes the definition of “freedom” is “give the government more power over both app developers who voluntarily integrate the SDK and users who voluntarily download the app”.
> voluntarily I don't remember apps listing the SDKs they use. As a humble user, how do I voluntarily choose whether to download an app or not based on their usage of Facebook's garbage? Edit: You can't have it both ways. You can't remove a bunch of power and information from the user in the name of "safety" and "UX" and then claim that users are making a bunch of choices they can't possibly be informed about "volunt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gave up after realizing that Signal will not deliver message for a couple of days and that message notification doesn't work. Why wasting personal credit on something that is clearly inferior from the usability point of view. And after it started insisting on creating a PIN each time I start Signal, I finally deleted it from my phone. You can forget about security if you can't get a seamless user experience.
> I gave up after realizing that Signal will not deliver message for a couple of days and that message notification doesn't work. That has never happened to me.
Stop using facebook's garbage! Or if you must, use their oauth flow and API but _don't_ include code of theirs you don't control directly in your binary. It's just asking for trouble. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23099788