Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater

icelimit@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  • The creator is not an immigrant
  • Nothing preventing malicious users from flooding the app with false reports
  • Estimated 98% of reports are false positives, whether malicious or not
  • Dev doesn’t seem to understand much about privacy or security
  • Doesn’t distribute Android version due to previously-mentioned lack of understanding
  • Overall does more harm than good

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Jen asked:

    There’s a lot of secure software, that probably people in this room work on, that is developed in the open, and that is used primarily by at-risk users, including things like Tor, Signal, SecureDrop. That’s great, because it makes it easy for folks to contribute. Maybe you don’t want that, I understand that can be hard. But it also makes it easier for people to audit and gain assurance that the app is doing what you claim without having to have, you know, EFF reverse engineer it. Would you be open to making the app open source?

    His answer: “Absolutely not.”

    Why? “I don’t want anybody from the government to have their hooks in how I’m doing what I’m doing. Once you go open source, everybody has access to it. So I’m just going to keep the codebase private at this time.”

    He also claimed that the government can’t learn everything about how an app works by reverse engineering it, which isn’t true.

    I agree with Jen. His answers are very concerning.

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  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The first one seems irrelevant. The second is sort of inevitable without making it hard to report anything.

    Everything else is just exactly what people were saying from the start. I dont know why people keep defending this privacy nightmare of an app.

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    • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      The first one seems irrelevant.

      I agree. I’m just repeating what I read.

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      • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Yeah i know. Wasnt judging your comment, only the original article based on the info in your comment.

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