[The White House app] ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app)
The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them - but it’s embedding its SDK in its official app?!
I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there - it was just added by whatever contractor built the app, but that’s arguably even worse.
And I have absolutely no doubt that if it was discovered in a political opponent’s app, and the administration wanted to harm them, there would be no compunction about using that fact against them.
> I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there
Assuming incompetence gives the administration a cover to get away with anything. I'm not quite sure they're as stupid as they all act. Someone is surely using the facade of incompetence to rot things from the inside out.
The current administration has created a narrative that everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad. Facts or meaning do not matter any more. I honestly don't understand how the USA has become this. This won't end well.
It started with Richard Nixon and his cynical manoevering.
It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?
It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.
No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).
Yeah the democrats are at fault here too. Clinton had eight years to rollback any damage from Nixon and Reagan. Obama had eight years to rollback any damage from them + Bush. Biden had four years to rollback any damage from them + Trump.
One could argue that the courts or congress/senate may not have been favorable during their time, but that wasn't true during the entire combined 20 years they had.
(siddnote - I think "nadir" was the answer to a crossword clue I was stumped on. I'd never heard it before that. And I thought I'd never hear it again. Interesting coincidence!)
I think Trump being elected is a result of anti-thought, feudalism-seeking part of society coming to power, not a cause. Enough people were fed up with thinking elites stealing from them, so they elected thought-averse elites to steal from them because they naively thought that the stealing is because of intelligence.
What? Trump is just a symptom. The US didn't suddenly become what it is now because of a vote. Like it or not (and I certainly don't), the people voted for this, twice. Whether they voted for it because they actually wanted it vs they voted for it because politicians convinced them they wanted it, it is what we wanted.
Sure, absolutely. But again, the people voted for fascism. At his pre-election rallies he'd say shit like "I'm gonna be a dictator for a day!" and get cheers.
An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.
I think it's like that old saying about bankruptcy - it happens very slowly, then all at once
The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positioned things perfectly for right-wing propaganda to explode in the internet age - once social media came around, it was a renaissance for the paranoid-style radical right-wing demagogues, and they exploded in numbers and reach. In turn, that tilled the soil for a Trump figure to come along to disrupt things.
Trump basically took all the recurring themes of grievance from right-wing media to the extreme to turbo-charge the anxiety and fear of the right, including most things that were generally considered wrong for politicians to say/do.
It's almost hard to remember the before-times, but Trump was the first modern presidential ticket that outright attacks the media (calling them the enemy of the people, fake news, etc) to de-legitimize them - it used to be a point of pride in this country that politicians didn't do stuff like this, because it's a feature of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Right-wing audiences were very used to hearing that sort of thing though, because it was a common feature of the right-wing propaganda media they had been boiling in for years.
When I was in high school (or maybe even junior high), I remember learning the bill of rights and the freedom of speech and press and assembly. Our curricula and case studies always focused on freedom of speech because I guess it was absurd to think that the govt would ever attack the press. That was a thing "other" countries did.
I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too, even if it is stupid speech. But attacking the press is insane.
No I mean the actual stupid shit he says, not the stupid policies he enacts. Like randomly getting up during a cabinet meeting to admire a ballroom that doesn't exist yet. That's stupid but harmless.
The apps have nothing to do with the current administration. All these permissions were already in place before the current administration. It’s easy to verify this by looking at previous versions of the apps. HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.
Ah.. I'm glad it's just a narrative then, and that there are in fact just as many good things to report and that America is not rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.
You're completely out of touch. If one thing the admin does is good for anyone but they and their cronies, even if only by accident, it is a total coincidence.
When a coworker leaves the company and I inherit their work, I am given a little bit of time to acclimate and understand the projects they were working on.
If it turns out a secret was exposed in production, or we're exposing PII in logs, or storing CCs or passwords in plain text, there's a certain time frame in which the blame shifts from my coworker for introducing it, to me for not catching it.
An app published March 27th has no prior-administration version history. The other 7 apps in the piece span back to Obama the article treats this as a bipartisan failure.
As I've said, facts or meaning no longer matter. There are numerous cases where Trump blamed Democrats for something he did during his first term or took credit for something positive that the Biden administration did. HN does not create a narrative, people are free to post their opinions here.
This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number.
when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.
(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")
The closing point is the one that should get more attention — every single one of these apps could be replaced by a web page. And from a product standpoint, there's really only one reason to ship a native app when your content is just press releases and weather alerts: you want access to APIs
the browser won't give you. Background location, biometrics, device identity, boot triggers — none of that is available through a browser, and that's by, unfortunately, design.
Relatedly, I just registered for PACER to download court documents. It's pretty shocking that to get public legal documents the US Federal Court system requires full name, birthdate, address, phone, email, credit card info... and I THINK (it's past the initial registration page so can't confirm 100%) also mother's maiden name and 2 common security questions. Just a treasure-trove of PII if it ever falls into the wrong hands. (What's esp frustrating is even after going through this, I had to call a number and wait on hold for 1 hour to activate the account.)
Do these posts just get upvoted due to the graphics/animations? I find this site incredibly difficult to read with things re-playing as you scroll up and down and the articles I've read from here are often light on details. The graphics seem very AI-generated (overlapping text and other little issues) which makes me think the whole thing is from an LLM.
While this post does have some interesting information, I have to wade through distracting animations that seem "off" which makes me questions all of it.
You could not pay me to use any of these apps. All of my own devices run some form of Linux (Debian for servers, Arch for desktop/laptop, GrapheneOS on phone). I generally refuse to use non-free software, the main exception being Steam on a dedicated gaming rig.
I really don't understand why everything has to be an "app." My phone only has a handful of apps, including two web browsers, through which other things are accessed. No app gets access to location, sensors, the camera, or the microphone.
Most of this is bad, but I think it's reasonable for the FEMA app, whose purpose is to help you get to the nearest shelters, to have access to your location.
Sheesh... I should not have downloaded the White House app yesterday just to see how ludicrous it was. I just deleted it, though I'm sure a lot of my data has already been exfiltrated. Doesn't excessive tracking like this violate the App Store + Google Play's ToS?
Ahhhh the USA, we can do anything, but others cannot!
The duality of the Statunitians politician.
Folks kept saying Apple protect your data and what not, now folks have their entire phone scanned by Apple unless they prove they are adults by sending personal documents which are being breached left and right.
Complaining about Smartlink is a bit hypocritical as it's the smartphone equivalent of an ankle tracker. The opportunity cost for the user is incarceration.
So no, thank you USA. I'm not going to visit you. I have all I need in this our European "socialism" as many Americans like to call it. I'm not assumed to be a criminal, and governments aren't building databases of all my steps and activities, and I have a great healthcare.
they hire one day shell companies that give them a huge chunk of the money back illegally, then turn around and hire a cheap ad agency specialized in churning hotsites and conference apps.
it's literary the same playbook of any developing country when some obviously corrupt group is elected promising to cut government spending
There is currently an attempt going on by several governments to crack down harder against the people. While before it was "only", say, California and their age-sniffing laws infiltrating and tainting Linux - thus declaring war against the people, as revealed by Meta acting as primary lobbyist here - today I read that now that age-sniffing was also approved in some european countries (in one EU country the parents are required to install a sniffing app and thus verify the age of the kids; I think it was in Greece. I'd never help any government act as fascist sniffing proxy trying to control and monitor by kids, that is an act of betrayal of such a government), their next line of attack is against VPN. Suddenly the picture shifts, because if VPNs are targeted, how does finding an excuse such as "but but but think about the kids", make any sense? That is very clearly governments becoming increasingly fascist. Add a few lobbyists here and there who benefit financially from this and now we suddenly understand how democracies are undermined. See also:
281 comments
[The White House app] ships with 3 embedded trackers including Huawei Mobile Services Core (yes, the Chinese company the US government sanctioned, shipping tracking infrastructure inside the sitting president's official app)
The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them - but it’s embedding its SDK in its official app?!
I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there - it was just added by whatever contractor built the app, but that’s arguably even worse.
And I have absolutely no doubt that if it was discovered in a political opponent’s app, and the administration wanted to harm them, there would be no compunction about using that fact against them.
> I realize the decision makers probably don’t even know it’s there
Assuming incompetence gives the administration a cover to get away with anything. I'm not quite sure they're as stupid as they all act. Someone is surely using the facade of incompetence to rot things from the inside out.
“Y'all are mad about the dog whistle but you forgot about the dog”
> everything they do is good, while anything their opponents do is bad.
Even when it's the same thing! (e.g. "canceling" someone)
It was reinforced with Ronald Reagan. Remember how he spun the Iranian revolution and the bad economy on his opposition? Remember how he rode the Moral Majority wave?
It was taken up a notch by G. W. Bush and his band of trigger-happy self-serving country club elitists.
No one in between those points tried to roll back the progress. They're just as guilty. It's been a monotonic increasing function towards the current apex (nadir?).
Fear what comes next. If there is a next.
One could argue that the courts or congress/senate may not have been favorable during their time, but that wasn't true during the entire combined 20 years they had.
(siddnote - I think "nadir" was the answer to a crossword clue I was stumped on. I'd never heard it before that. And I thought I'd never hear it again. Interesting coincidence!)
An America that didn't like fascism would have never even let this man win the primary.
The rise of right-wing propaganda mass media has been simmering brains for 3 decades in a populist, grievance and resentment stew and positioned things perfectly for right-wing propaganda to explode in the internet age - once social media came around, it was a renaissance for the paranoid-style radical right-wing demagogues, and they exploded in numbers and reach. In turn, that tilled the soil for a Trump figure to come along to disrupt things.
Trump basically took all the recurring themes of grievance from right-wing media to the extreme to turbo-charge the anxiety and fear of the right, including most things that were generally considered wrong for politicians to say/do.
It's almost hard to remember the before-times, but Trump was the first modern presidential ticket that outright attacks the media (calling them the enemy of the people, fake news, etc) to de-legitimize them - it used to be a point of pride in this country that politicians didn't do stuff like this, because it's a feature of authoritarian regimes, not democracies. Right-wing audiences were very used to hearing that sort of thing though, because it was a common feature of the right-wing propaganda media they had been boiling in for years.
I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too, even if it is stupid speech. But attacking the press is insane.
>I can look past some of the stupid shit he says. He gets freedom of speech too
That just means it’s legally permissible, not reasonable, respectable, or conscionable. Do not look past the things he says.
> HN has created a narrative that everything the current administration does is bad.
In all fairness, that narrative has been helped quite a bit by the current administration!
If it turns out a secret was exposed in production, or we're exposing PII in logs, or storing CCs or passwords in plain text, there's a certain time frame in which the blame shifts from my coworker for introducing it, to me for not catching it.
That time frame is a lot less than one year.
It’s easy to verify this by looking at the App Store listing for the app. And reading news coverage.
> The executive branch has decided this company is so dangerous I can’t buy a monitor made by them
Huawei was sanctioned because they did business with a sanctioned country
>
This thing also has a "Text the President" button that auto-fills your message with "Greatest President Ever!" and then collects your name and phone number.when is the onion going to go bankrupt? it has to be soon, i imagine. no way it can compete with reality at this point.
(the rest of the article is a bit too depressing for me to comment on at the moment, other than saying "wow, gross")
While this post does have some interesting information, I have to wade through distracting animations that seem "off" which makes me questions all of it.
I really don't understand why everything has to be an "app." My phone only has a handful of apps, including two web browsers, through which other things are accessed. No app gets access to location, sensors, the camera, or the microphone.
What is the ios equivalent?
The duality of the Statunitians politician.
Folks kept saying Apple protect your data and what not, now folks have their entire phone scanned by Apple unless they prove they are adults by sending personal documents which are being breached left and right.
Deserved!!!!
Whoever fulfilled this contract gets a stop work order for gross incompetence and the CORs/COs should be terminated immediately
it's literary the same playbook of any developing country when some obviously corrupt group is elected promising to cut government spending
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
Democracy needs to be adjusted - right now private interests can too easily sabotage and undermine it.