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Posted by e_daigle 1 day ago

“Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number(ericdaigle.ca)
606 points | 287 commentspage 3
sneak 1 day ago|
This is the same thing that sent weev to jail when he and JB did it against AT&T to determine the email addresses (instead of PINs) of every iPad 3G user.
ryandrake 1 day ago||
I love the quote the article starts with:

> Neither of us had prior experience developing mobile apps, but we thought, “Hey, we’re both smart. This shouldn’t be too difficult.”

I think, 40 years from now when we're writing about this last decade or so of software development, this quote is going to sum it all up.

jakelazaroff 1 day ago||
> To help bring this idea to life, I enlisted one of my employees from Zeke SEO—a very talented developer with an MBA in computer science from Stanford.

That… is not a real degree.

tclancy 1 day ago|||
Graduated with the highest temperature in his class.
Insanity 1 day ago||||
Pretty sure they just mean a Master degree and they _think_ that’s what MBA means. I might be too charitable, but if someone doesn’t have experience with higher education it’s not an unlikely mistake.
jcranmer 1 day ago||||
You can charitably read it as "MBA from Stanford, with a focus on computer science-related stuff," or maybe "MBA and a bachelor's in CS from Stanford." Or you could assume that it's an MS in CS that was 'autocorrected' to MBA.

But the way it's phrased and worded... at best, it's the kind of really bad typo that shows rank incompetence; at worst, it's outright fabrication that is actively lying about the credentials; and what I think most likely, it's obfuscation that's relying on credentialism to impart an imprimatur of credibility that is wholly undeserved (i.e. "I got an unrelated degree at Stanford, but it's Stanford and how could anyone who goes there be bad at CS?").

jijijijij 1 day ago|||
No degree, just a kid with a Macbook Air.
garyfirestorm 1 day ago|||
i mean looking at the app's security its indeed an MBA in CS from Stanford
sigmoid10 1 day ago|||
Stanford, Kentucky perhaps.
elif 1 day ago||
I think it was a typo. The computer scientist in question likely received his UGA degree in Sanford stadium, and in fairness no one else at the school was able to discern the difference between a business degree and computer science.
voidfunc 1 day ago|||
It really says a lot about our society in general. I believe there's a small portion of bad actors pushing stupid policies for their own agenda, but then I also believe there's a huge number of actual people who have lost any ability to reason critically and learn. What we're seeing is those people learning via trial and error while subjecting us to their live trials because they couldn't be bothered to pick up a book or trust the existing experts.
hydrogen7800 1 day ago|||
>because they couldn't be bothered to pick up a book or trust the existing experts.

It's not laziness. It's populism rejecting what they consider elitism, which includes expertise and experience.

titzer 1 day ago|||
I don't know how to square "populism" with the metric asston of propaganda coming from people whose job is literally to know better but instead chose to feed people bad information and amplify stupidity. This ain't grass roots populism...at all.
nyeah 1 day ago|||
Obviously getting people hooked on harmful lies was not originally populism. But now it sort of functions like populism. Now it hurts when the lies stop.

I think we've all been the one who got fooled in some relationship. Maybe for you it wasn't a political party. But I bet it still hurt.

jtbayly 1 day ago|||
Are you talking about Fauci or who?
iwontberude 1 day ago|||
How could they not have realized that leopards eat people’s faces.
munificent 1 day ago|||
Social media is the greatest force multiplier ever invented for narcissists.
V__ 1 day ago|||
I think this also sums up most of the administration: "Nobody knew health care would be that hard"
nickff 1 day ago|||
Your quote would seemingly apply to a number of recent administrations, given the state of federal healthcare programs and legislation.
RankingMember 1 day ago|||
The difference is that they didn't brag about how easy it would be before failing
unglaublich 1 day ago||
Always the asymmetric standards... R may fuck everything up if D made a mistake.
RankingMember 1 day ago|||
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying.
DonHopkins 1 day ago|||
But Rs fuck things up on purpose, even things that hurt themselves, just own own the libs, and then complain about how things are so fucked up.
lobf 1 day ago|||
What other administrations have said healthcare wouldn't be hard?
candiddevmike 1 day ago||||
No, in this case you can attribute to malice instead of stupidity. Thankfully the stupidity is limiting the amount of malice in some cases.
jiggawatts 1 day ago|||
Single payer is easy!

If you reject the best and only easy option from the outset because you don’t want actual healthcare, then yeah… whatever remains is going to be “hard”.

What the US has right now is a complex entrenched system of financial middlemen that refuse to abandon their rent seeking. They provide only(!) financial “services” and will fight actual healthcare tooth and nail.

Trump wasn’t strong enough — or simply didn’t care enough — to fight these people.

cavisne 1 day ago|||
[flagged]
Natfan 1 day ago||
what exactly does this contribute to the discussion?
swatcoder 1 day ago|||
> 40 years from now when we're writing

"ChatGPT, write an essay about software development during the smartphone social networking boom. Find a good quote to sum it all up."

bigfishrunning 1 day ago||
God i hope not.
tclancy 1 day ago|||
For me, it was in the linked blog post

>"Now, anyone who has read Mindset by Carol Dweck, Grit by Angela Duckworth, or The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., knows that you can be, do, and have whatever you want."

The gap between "read" and "understood" swallows so many. Also, did he use TR's "Man in the Arena" quotation? Reader, of course he did.

phantasmish 1 day ago||
Understanding these might not be enough, even. IDK about the last entry but IIRC the first two works are basically in the “pop-science/self-help woo” category that hustle-culture people reliably fall for.
throwacct 1 day ago|||
I love it. This needs to be on the front page of every newspaper, hehe. I don't care if you're a republican or a democrat, anyone going that way deserves everything they get.
firefax 1 day ago|||
> Neither of us had prior experience developing mobile apps, but we thought, “Hey, we’re both smart.

Great example of how perception and reality can differ vastly

locopati 1 day ago|||
that pretty much sums up the American conservative mindset, without the part about being smart
expedition32 1 day ago|||
I downloaded a save game editor for a videogame last night and the developer was honest about using AI.

But for a commercial messaging app you expect better...

shadowgovt 1 day ago|||
Software development and governance for this era, more or less yes.

There's a general zeitgeist of "Experts don't know what they're talking about" that has fed both pieces of this space. It's an Age of Doubt, as it were, but the hubristic kind of doubt, not the questing kind.

j45 1 day ago|||
Hubris as a feature.
oersted 1 day ago|||
Great and terrible things have been done from:

> We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it was easy.

engineer_22 1 day ago||
[flagged]
temp0826 1 day ago||
Eternal demo day
whoknowsidont 1 day ago||
Why does the title not match the article? It's under the character limit.

Original title is: “Super secure” MAGA-themed messaging app leaks everyone’s phone number

I think that's incredibly important context. Instead of conferring with actual experts in the field, the populist, fascist segment of our society just decided to wing it with technology.

They BELIEVED they were more secure, with no evidence to back it up.

NekkoDroid 1 day ago||
> Why does the title not match the article? It's under the character limit.

Well obviously we can't be seen as non-neutral (I wish I would be joking, but I have a feeling that is the thought process on a good day)

maqp 1 day ago||
Yup, it's almost like they're feelings/emotions over evidence/science. It's not that hard to understand considering how that weird lot consists of all sorts of cranks, pooled by the alt right radicalization pipelines of wellness/conspirituality/flat earth/alt-med/anti-vaccine/UFOs...
theultdev 1 day ago||
Freedom Chat just looks (and sounds) like a grift tbh.

The website doesn't really spark any confidence.

Never heard of it and I'd be surprised if they have more than 100 users.

burnt-resistor 1 day ago|
And it will invariably become a SIGINT and HUMINT pipeline leading straight to Moscow.
aanet 1 day ago||
The emoji :facepalm: was invented for exactly this...
kgwxd 1 day ago|
Not really, the grift is going exactly as planned. I indirectly, and accidentally, made some money off a similar grift about a year ago. I'm starting to think I should just lower my standards for a few years, then retire. It's so easy to extract millions from idiots, with very little investment.
lettergram 1 day ago||
Feels a little like clickbait "MAGA-themed", never heard of Converso.

That said, the analysis itself is interesting and worth a look, if nothing else it's a general pattern you can follow for many chat applications to see how secure it is.

SV_BubbleTime 1 day ago|
This, I have extremely varied media sources and Converso isn’t a real thing.
crnkovic 1 day ago|||
Converso renamed itself to Freedom Chat after my blog post:

https://crnkovic.dev/testing-converso/

SV_BubbleTime 1 day ago||
Still not a real thing. Highly suspect here.
agentifysh 1 day ago||||
This article is the first time I am hearing about it
mikestew 1 day ago||||
Are you and OP being sarcastic? Or are your media sources just not as "varied" as you might think?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/17/converso_e2ee_app/

lettergram 23 hours ago||
All 1000 downloads...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomcha...

mikestew 6 hours ago||
That's different than "I've never heard of it". So it's a real thing, and now you've heard of it. <Insert appropriate xkcd comic here>
SV_BubbleTime 30 minutes ago||
No one has heard of it. Just admit you got here because you were fooled into thinking your team was better at something, you were played.

You never questioned it wasn’t a real service. When confronted you pretend it doesn’t matter that it’s a security lapse in a tiny no name project.

lettergram 23 hours ago||||
1000 downloads lol

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freedomcha...

SV_BubbleTime 22 hours ago||
Exactly! The premise here is BS. Just a thinly veiled “lul look how dumb maga is” when it’s a no name app no one has ever used and has nothing to do with “maga”.
mikestew 6 hours ago||
Good job moving the goal posts. So it is a real thing. Yeah, I smell some BS alright.
UniverseHacker 1 day ago||
It appears that one of the most central aspects of MAGA is a postmodernist rejection of the very existence of expertise- except, ironically, in the art of grifting itself because they see “recognized experts” in any field as just very successful grifters. Hence replacing competent government employees at every level with incompetent employees. It would track that technology developed for and by the MAGA community is developed with the same philosophy. Anyone planning to buy the Trump phone?
LetsGetTechnicl 1 day ago||
Accusing someone else of a crime/problem/whatever that you're also currently doing? Well that's just the MAGA way.
tonymet 1 day ago|
Can those of you writing off half of America as “ignorant “ or “anti -science “ please move those comments back to Reddit. And what conclusions did you draw when obvious left leaning apps were breached ? FB, LI , Washington Post , twitter (pre Elon) all had breaches . Does that mean left and right leaning Americans are all ignorant ?

I don’t take any offense , but I do have high standards for this forum and cringe comments make me less likely to hang out here

sigwinch 1 day ago||
On a site called Hacker News, we need more analysis of one of the classic hacker skills, social engineering. Our first luminary hackers, and their first books, and our first movies, are about manipulating your average office worker or security guard. It doesn't work every time, but those people vote and hackers illuminated some early tools at automating the manipulation.

The turning point was smartphones. No, they don't clandestinely listen to the audio, or smuggle tower locations of unimportant people. But (all of our) behavior changes when we rely on an app and give up those other liberties because app. Some social engineering was required for mass adoption thereof, and most of us here are acquainted with the analytical means to concentrate delivering that. Half of our society has weaknesses that we euphemize as "gaming habits" or "addictive personalities". Maybe they know it; I'm not down here haughtily scoffing that they cannot know it.

China and Russia and North Korea don't show those weaknesses because those people are down in the mines. The powers learned social engineering within their closed societies, not in our open societies. They promote a nation and a people unified with one personality. The United States and similar freedom exponents have to contend with attracting the world's talent by explicitly tolerating any personality. At least for now

acdha 1 day ago||
None of the sites you mentioned are (or were) left-leaning unless you are saying anyone less politically correct than Fox News is leftie, but that’s missing the bigger reason why the MAGA connection matters: MAGA is at its heart conspiratorial, obsessed with the idea that the “elites” are against the common man. That war on expertise has been there from the beginning and it makes followers unusually vulnerable to scams because it normalizes this way of thinking that everyone’s opinion deserves equal weight. Sure, security experts say to use Signal but why should you trust them any more than the scientists who say the earth is warming or the economists who say that gold has drawbacks as the basis for an economic system?
jjgreen 1 day ago|||
The Sturmabteilung were lefties compared to the Schutzstaffel I guess.
tonymet 1 day ago||
Reddit comment++
jjgreen 16 hours ago||
Too kind
tonymet 1 day ago||||
It would waste my breath to try to convince you that MAGA Americans actually are intelligent. My point is that all apps have breaches , and a great many of them are run by liberals (who love climate change and inflation, as you do ) , so what does any of this have to do with a tech forum
acdha 1 day ago||
> It would waste my breath to try to convince you that MAGA Americans actually are intelligent

Definitely, because I never said they weren’t and certainly don’t believe that — I know too many smart conservatives for that. That’s a big part of the problem: smart people can put a lot of effort into constructing rationalizations so when they’re immersed in a culture where political correctness trumps objectivity they’ll construct elaborate narratives to support the ideologically useful outcome.

The relevance to security is that these people are more vulnerable because they can’t tell charlatans who appear to be on their side apart from people who actually know what they’re talking about. There are tons of right-leaning people in tech but as we saw with election fraud claims, the competent ones know it’s risky to contradict the narrative and stay quiet rather than being accused of being RINOs. It’s similar to how things like MLM scams spread in religious communities if you have experience with that, where things usually have to get pretty bad before someone is willing to criticize a friendly member of their congregation.

tonymet 6 hours ago||
don't you see how this perspective is the same tribalism (all my leaders are benevolent, all of theirs are tyrants / grifters)?

For every example of Maga group think, I can think of an example of Obamaphile group think.

And if the contrarian / doubtful end of the spectrum ( all elites are nefarious) is bad, doesn't that imply that the gullible / trusting end of the spectrum (all elites & academics are benevolent) is also bad?

The roles are just a mirror of each other. You're just picking sides -- which is how things usually operate.

tonymet 1 day ago|||
They are left leaning and run predominantly by left leaning staff and boards . FB and X have pivoted opportunistically to Trump , and still only slightly
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