Looks like what you might expect in a standard marketing app from a consultancy. They probably hired someone to develop it, that shop used their standard app architecure which includes location tracking code and the other stuff.
If only the US Digital Service still existed as an agency to do this right. Too bad it's now been hollowed out to be DOGE, subject to multiple active lawsuits.
The location tracking code is within the OneSignal SDK - which is just a standard messaging platform for sending emails/push messages to users. It doesn't have some magical permissions bypass, the app itself has to request it.
And r8 which does tree shaking to remove dead code is not smart enough to understand react native so it won't strip it out without extra work from the developer.
Cross referencing these different things in the article to other apps that exist was my first thought as these seem pretty generic and probably reused from somewhere else.
The Polish covid quarantine app was famously adapted from some app for store inspectors or something, as it already implemented most of the required functionalities, like asking for photos via push at random times, sending them along with a location etc.
They likely did a search-and-replace on the brand name, so you had strings like 'your invoices from Home Quarantine inc' in the code.
Not a bad thing per se, getting the app out the door asap was definitely a priority in that project for understandable reasons, but funny nonetheless.
I think its cost over $5mm at this point, and the website doesn't exist. Oh, the company that built the site is owned by, I think the spouse of a council member, or something of that ilk.
Has the Hatch Act ever been enforced? Every administration in the last 20+ years have had people violate it but as far as I can tell nobody has been found guilty.
But snark aside, the next elections will be decided around damage control. Yes, the old school dems are pretty spineless (corrupt) but i guess even they feel the temptation of revenge and taking out political opponents for good. I really hope the new generation of democrats succeeds and breaks the corruption ties.
Thank you for understanding. I'm pointing things like Obama "looking forward not backward" and not punishing Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Condi, etc for war crimes and illegal warmongering which leads directly to today's current illegal Iran invasion.
We will need actual punishments for everyone who illegally defunded (or funded) programs, got us into the Iran invasion, embezzled and lined their pockets with corruption etc etc etc.
> Hatch Act won't be enforced until the next administration and next DOJ.
How did that last administration's dwelling on persecuting the one before it turn out?
While I don't like the current one and certainly agree that some of its actions are totally unethical, once it's over can we just move on and look forward, not back?
The only possible way this country has a future is if crime is actually punished. If the members of this current administration who committed criminal acts do not actually suffer the consequences then what is to stop the next one?
Without consequences for illegal behaviour, there's no incentive for bad actors to not continue acting bad. This, in no small part, explains why we are where we are today - a misplaced attempt to 'move forward' by ignoring illegal actions.
Without holding those who do wrong to account, positive movement will always be dogged or straight-up negated by those who do wrong without facing justice.
That'll only work here if there are reforms to the pardon power while we're at it. Any convictions a Democratic administration manages to obtain will be pardoned the next time a Republican gets in.
What do you mean by dodgy meds? These are just the normal meds you can get at any pharmacy. They also aren't even peddling them. They just link to pharmacies or provide discount codes.
You’ll sell it if you sell your company (as per your privacy policy).[1]
We may disclose or transfer your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any acquisition of our business, financing or similar transaction.
If you wouldn’t sell it, period, then I’d suggest amending your privacy policy to include irrevocable deletion of customer data at the point your company is sold to a buyer.
Great question, however the important point here is that the company makes the claim they will not sell user data. "Period." So the company implies that if they are sold they will be sold with no user data
I believe the problem is not doing this, but the text in the policy is misleading, since users would believe their data would never be shared with anyone outside of the company itself _unconditionally_, which is not true (if only by technicality), the data can be sold as part of the company.
The onesignal domain is on the IPFire Domain Blocklist
Found 1 list exactly matching 'onesignal.com':
- https://dbl.ipfire.org/lists/ads/domains.txt
block list
added: 2026-02-13 15:00:20
last modified: 2026-02-13 15:00:20
last updated: 2026-03-29 04:02:16 (126.625 domains)
enabled, used in 1 group
comment: "IPFire Advertising"
matching entries:
- onesignal.com
Scrolling is extremely poorly behaved on that page for me too, Firefox 149 Windows 10. Which is quite ironic coming from an article that mainly criticizes the web dev aspects of the app!
The argument regarding no certificate pinning seems to miss that just because I might be on a network that MITM's TLS traffic doesn't mean my device trusts the random CA used by the proxy. I'd just get a TLS error, right?
Not if someone can issue the certificate signed by the CA your phone trust.
Imagine being in a cafe nearby, say, embassy of the certain north African country known for pervasive and wide espionage actions, which decides to hijack traffic in this cafe.
Or imagine living in the country where almost all of the cabinet is literally (officially) being paid by the propaganda/lobbying body of such country.
Or living int he country where lawful surveillance can happen without the jury signoff, but at a while of any police officer.
> Imagine being in a cafe nearby, say, embassy of the certain north African country known for pervasive and wide espionage actions, which decides to hijack traffic in this cafe.
How would they get your phone to trust their CA? Connecting to a Wi-Fi network doesn’t change which CAs a device trusts.
Because there is a quadrillion trusted CAs in every device you might use. A good chunk of these CAs have been compromised at one point or another, and rogue certificates are sold in the dark market. Also any goverment can coerce a domiciled CA to issue certs for their needs.
All modern browsers require certificates to be published in the certificate transparency logs in order to be considered valid.
These are monitored, things do get noticed[0], and things like this can and have lead to CAs being distrusted.
It's not foolproof, and it's reactive rather than proactive... but in general, this is unlikely to be happening on major sites or at any significant scale.
I'd wholeheartedly recommend people taking some time and reading through the CA Compliance issues on Bugzilla. The entire CA program there, in my opinion, does a fantastic and largely thankless job of keeping this whole thing on the rails. It's one of the few things I can say I had _more_ trust in the more I looked into it.
China telecom regularly has BGP announcements that conflict with level3's ASNs.
Just as a hint in case you want to dig more into the topic, RIR data is publicly available, so you can verify yourself who the offenders are.
Also check out the Geedge leaked source code, which also implements TLS overrides and inspection on a country scale. A lot of countries are customers of Geedge's tech stack, especially in the Middle East.
Just sayin' it's more common than you're willing to acknowledge.
Well yes, CAs and the ICANN model of DNS are intertwined and fundamentally broken in multiple ways. However the system as a whole is largely "good enough" as can be seen from its broad success under highly adversarial conditions in the real world.
That's not really how security works. Either it's broken, or it's not. Security is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Whether it's good enough or not... hard to say.
That sort of reasoning only applies to algorithms - those shatter the way glass does. Other stuff is more pliable. It's entirely possible to shoplift but there's a nonzero chance you'll get caught. Is the supermarket's security broken? There are many known attacks against it so I'd say that it is.
Notice my wording above - fundamentally broken in multiple ways - by which I mean that there are clear and articulable flaws with the model. Nonetheless it's clearly quite functional in practice.
This is stopped by certificate transparency logs. Your software should refuse to accept a certificate which hasn’t been logged in the transparency logs, and if a rogue CA issues a fraudulent certificate, it will be detected.
Certificate transparency doesn't prevent misissuance, it only makes detection easier after the fact. Someone still needs to be monitoring CT and revoke the cert. I actually believe most HTTP stacks on Android don't even check cert revocations by default.
I'm not too sure what the detection process is like, but being found to sign fraudulent certificates results in your CA being untrusted and is the end of your business. So it's not going to be done lightly even if there isn't automated systems to catch it instantly (which there likely are at least for major websites)
The detection process basically boils down to 'server admins need to check CT themselves'. A CA also doesn't have to be malicious; a non-CA malicious actor could also exploit a vulnerability in the verification process of an honest CA. Depending on the severity of the situation that's unlikely to get them removed from the root stores.
Interesting example: last year Cloudflare found out that a CA had been (incorrectly) issuing certs for 1.1.1.1. They only found out 1.5 years after the first cert had been issued. The CA didn't do it with malicious intent, and as far as I know they're still in business. https://blog.cloudflare.com/unauthorized-issuance-of-certifi...
I don't believe it's supposed to proactively check the logs as that would inevitably break in the presence of properly configured MITM middleboxes which are present on many (most?) corporate networks.
The point of the logs as I understand it is to surface events involving official CAs after the fact.
Clients are supposed to check. For example, Apple requires a varying number of SCTs in order for Safari to trust server certificates. https://support.apple.com/en-us/103214
So how does that work with middleboxes? Corporate isn't about to forgo egress security (nor should they).
I don't currently MITM my LAN but my general attitude is that if something won't accept my own root certificate from the store then it's broken, disrespecting my rights, and I want nothing to do with it. Trust decisions are up to me, not some third party.
Corporate managed machines can control the software running on the computer to do anything. I'm not sure the details, but chrome certainly can support corporate MITM. There's likely some setting you have to configure first.
The default should be to reject certificates which aren't being logged, and if you as a user or corporation have a reason to use private certificates, you just configure your computer to do that. Which fully protects against the risk of normal CAs signing fraudulent certificates.
The entire point of transparency logs is to detect a cert issued by a different root CA despite both being trusted. The corporate MITM cert won't be present in the logs by design.
Ok, fair point. However, I would consider any MDM-enabled device fully "compromised" in the sense that the org can see and modify everything I do on it.
An MDM orga cannot install a trusted CA on non-supervised (company owned) devices. By default on BYOD these are untrusted and require manual trust. It also cannot see everything on your device - certainly not your email, notes or files, or app data.
As someone who has an MDM-managed device, I beg to differ. Although, this one uses newer style android MDM, which involves factory resetting and doing special things during OOBE. Even if it used the older style, nothing's stopping the app for requesting file access, notification access, etc. and not working until you grant the permissions.
Nothing is stopping any app from the Play store to request any particular permission, not just MDM apps, right? And yet, no app can read arbitrary filesystem data including random app data without your device being rooted first.
If anything, one of many MDM purposes is to prevent orgas from enrolling rooted devices in their fleet.
Certificate pinning can be useful, especially in particularly sensitive areas. But I wouldn't expect it as a standard security practice. If anything I appreciate that it isn't done so that reverse engineers can thoroughly study the traffic on their own devices. I agree that it was odd that the article mentioned it more than a quick note, let along made a big deal out of it.
A bit skeptical of how this article is written as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app and it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article.
I've noticed Claude Code is happy to decompile APKs for you but isn't very good at doing reachability analysis or figuring out complex control flows. It will treat completely dead code as important as a commonly invoked function.
The permissions snippet they show also doesn't include location, and you can't request location at runtime at all without declaring it there.
I'd verify all this stuff for myself, but Play won't install it in my phone so I can't really get the APK. Maybe because I use Graphene...? but I don't know all the ways they can restrict it, maybe it's something else (though for a pixel 9a it's rather strange if it's hardware based).
--- EDIT ---
To be specific / add what I can check, this is what my Play Store "about -> permissions" is showing:
Version 47.0.1 may request access to
Other:
run at startup
Google Play license check
view network connections
prevent phone from sleeping
show notifications
com.google.android.c2dm.permission.RECEIVE
control vibration
have full network access
which appears fairly normal, and does not include location, and I think Play includes runtime location requests there. Maybe there's a version-rollout happening, or device-type targeting?
It can request with a JS call. It can't passively collect it without you approving first. The article is written like calling that JS function will turn on location tracking without consent.
That would allow you to see the local network IP (not actually sure you even get that, tbh). To get more detailed information about IP configuration, you need Location permission. Been there, done that. Most Android network information calls provide degraded information if you have not been granted Location permissions.
There's a specific writing style for globalized English that AI's use. And then this post also had none of the stylistic flourishes that a real author might add. And then simple things like constructing a table of 68 libraries or whatever organized by relatively subjective categories. That is something that nobody is going to do by hand.
There is a new term "load-bearing" which is used a lot in my usage of AI. Has anyone else encountered this term being used a lot in their conversations? Or is it a quirk of personalization?
I use load-bearing all the time in conversation. People need to be careful that just because they don’t use certain phrases, it doesn’t automatically mean AI.
Both you and parent are making a lot of load-bearing assumptions.
As someone who likes to use a lot of em dashes in writing -- the 'heuristics' that AI 'hunters' like to use need a lot of further refinement before I would trust them with anything. And yet there are legions of anti-AI crusaders out there wielding them like weapons.
These folks are reinforcing a bias against all kinds of people, particularly those who are not native English speakers and were very likely taught 'globalized' English in their language training.
There are also fashions. So people could be using "load-bearing" more because it's fashionable. Like "lets double-click on that", or "spinning rust", etc
I've heard it a lot from podcasts that are towards the abundance movement. I think its common within the rationalise movement.
Personally I really like it for "load-bearing assumptions". Because it let's you work with assumptions whilst pointing out the potential issues of that assumption.
Apparently just like OP, you didn't read the article either. Just because the app doesn't ask for permission in the manifest doesn't mean it can't be acquired at runtime. It's very publicly documented [0].
> Haven't you heard? It's cool to dislike things "because AI".
There's no explicit rules against it, but I cannot stand this type of sarcastic im anti-everyone-else commentary. Super reddit-coded, and you could have made your point without it. There's a lot of discussion to have about that point actually, but I'm pretty sure we've all been collectively scrolling long enough to just kind of roll our eyes at this stuff.
I read through it. I get some AI vibes. Probably a little bit of both.
It doesn't have to lie: unfortunately libraries that are essentially a full application themselves (complete with their own permissions) are not uncommon on mobile.
So it could come across a manifest that includes location permissions and some code that would (if enabled) send location, but it might do a bad job properly tracing
I think you should make proper counter arguments instead of dismissing something because they used a specific tool.
Ad-HomineLLM is a logical fallacy IMO and adds little value. I would hope eventually HN and other sites add this to the guidelines similar to other claims like vote manipulation etc.
GP was arguing against the OP, not a comment, and AI written posts are fair game.
Also, the comment you responded to was criticizing the attack to the substance of the post based on who/what wrote is. The comment neologism actually fits, IMO.
> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.
So at least it does something actually beneficial for the user! I wish it could go even further, the way Reader Mode in a browser would go.
i downloaded the app but it doesn't let you use the browser. i thought it was the white house doing something helpful for once and giving us some internet freedom. alas.
> That's a personal GitHub Pages site. If the lonelycpp GitHub account gets compromised, whoever controls it can serve arbitrary HTML and JavaScript to every user of this app, executing inside the WebView context.
I was promised a meritocracy and non stop winning. When do those begin?
> The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes (9.5m when in background), and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages (“lonelycpp” is acct, loads iframe viewer page).
Doesn’t seem too crazy for a generic react native app but of course coming from the official US government, it’s pretty wide open to supply chain attacks. Oh and no one should be continually giving the government their location. Pretty crazy that the official government is injecting JavaScript into web views to override the cookie banners and consent forms - it is often part of providing legal consent to the website TOS. But legal consent is not their strong suit I guess.
And when the app links off to an EU site? Nothing prevents an EU user from using this app. There are a variety of Trump enthusiasts, though I suspect less than there are here in the US.
Quite honestly, it’d be hilarious to see the clown car response from the White House if some EU bureaucrats tried to enforce their GDPR rules on the White House though. “Lol Make us” is the nicest response I can guess at.
They conduct a pervasive, hidden, persistent user tracking not only without consent, looking at the analysis, but also stripping the user from a chance of declining tracking on other sites.
Which federal law would be relevant here? I'm only aware of California and EU laws that might be. But, I'm fairly certain they don't apply to the US government because of several Constitutional and international laws superseding.
I'm not sure. If there is an attorney to answer that would be interesting.
> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.
Giving people a taste of web with Ublock Origin annoyance filters applied, refreshing. Can’t believe orange man regime is doing one thing right.
> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.
Rare Trump administration W. I'm assuming there's one particular website they open in the app that shows a cookie popup, and this was a dev's heavy-handed way of making that go away.
> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.
I wouldn't run a non-free government app on my phone, but this seems a positive. It's basically what uBlock does.
"An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls."
In their defense, this is the first thing the Trump admin has done that's unambiguously positive for ordinary people.
Yeah it's great, we can actually let go of these silly open source projects like uBlock Origin, and just rely on the government for protecting us against the dangerous web!
I too love it when US imperialism invades digital spaces, just ignore how the US treats people critical of its own government (not just referring to the Trump admin here) then yeah sure great.
Let me know when this can ignore malware/adware from US companies then I'll give accolades.
Every default setup on every website and app for the last five or so years has been encouraging users to add pronouns, making it difficult to avoid it, even my iPhone asks me to add each person’s pronouns when I add a new contact. I don’t know why Siri needs to know that, but it’s there. There’s one website I use that won’t let you sign up as a contributor without “completing your profile”, which includes mandatory pronouns.
I guess there’s some workplaces where it’d be useful for me to update these, probably the ones Apple PMs work in.
Well, it's past the edit window, and of course I accept the downvotes, but I realize that I should have provided a bit more context.
In the US, the faction in power right now is attacking perceived symbols of "woke" ideology, and one of them is the use of pronouns.
As I understand it, some government agencies are even forbidding the use of pronouns in e-mail signatures etc. So it struck me as ironic that a software component with pronouns would have evaded their notice.
I would imagine it would be useful in 100% of English-speaking workplaces because all workplaces have the expectation of English communication, which pronouns are essential for. If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
Inferring pronouns has always been dumb and annoying. Many names don't have obvious pronouns, for example, the name "Taylor". Is that he or she? And clicking the little profile icon and squinting to see if someone is a man or a woman is also a waste of time. It's a lot easier for everyone if it just tells you the pronoun.
> If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
It's only "out of your way" if you never learned to write gender neutral from the ground up.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
But if someone has the ability to broadcast their preferred pronouns and we built that in, and it costs nothing, then what's the problem?
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
I cannot see the harm in using a different pronoun or opening up the ability for that - it feels like a fake or imaginary problem that we are creating such that we have something to complain about to make ourselves feel better. If we want to feel better, we should just smoke or something.
How are you going to know the appropriate pronoun on your first email to "[email protected]" or "[email protected]"? Are you going to send an email to ask their pronouns before you send the actual email?
No, I'll probably just use gender neutral pronouns.
But if they reply back and their email footer has "he/him", I'm probably just gonna use he/him and not think twice about it, because I'm a well-adjusted adult.
Nah, I suspect any app that's loading arbitrary JS from somebody's random GitHub page would get called out for that behavior. We're getting supply chain attacks daily.
That is some impressive willful ignorance. “If it was anybody else threatening to beat this guy up for what he was saying, you’d probably praise them. But a cop does it one time and …”
You omitted these items immediately above that line:
Injects JavaScript into every website you open through its in-app browser to hide cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, signup walls, upsell prompts, and paywalls.
Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal's servers.
Loads JavaScript from a random person's GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app's WebView.
Loads third-party JavaScript from Elfsight (elfsightcdn.com/platform.js) for social media widgets, with no sandboxing.
Sends email addresses to Mailchimp, images are served from Uploadcare, and a
Truth Social embed is hardcoded with static CDN URLs. None of this is government infrastructure.
Has no certificate pinning. Standard Android trust management.
Ships with dev artifacts in production. A localhost URL, a developer IP (10.4.4.109), the Expo dev client, and an exported Compose PreviewActivity.
Profiles users extensively through OneSignal - tags, SMS numbers, cross-device aliases, outcome tracking, notification interaction logging, in-app message click tracking, and full user state observation.
> It’s hard to imagine a smug article like this dissecting a product of some other administration
Did the other administration put a "fake news" and "report to ICE" and grifting link to their own social network in their apps? I feel like you are perhaps papering over a whole lot of general shittiness of this app that didn't exist in less amateur previous administrations that at least tried to follow the norms.
> Since when is the government a slick and efficiently run outfit that produces secure and well-done software products? Does no one remember the original Obamacare launch?
Wasn't that written by a private company? Canadian, IIRC.
> It’s hard to imagine a smug article like this dissecting a product of some other administration.
Yes, that's because this administration is uniquely awful. Basically every single thing this administration does is bad. Often so bad that it's legitimately impressive just how incompetent our leaders our.
Obviously previous administrations were not perfect, but to sit here and pretend that they are on the same level is delusion.
"Amateur hour" is basically their theme. They were swept in on a wave of distrust for people who know what they're talking about. They were elected to tear down Chesterton's fence, even (and especially) the parts holding in the face-eating leopards.
To mix the metaphors further, they (the politicians and their supporters) fancy themselves the kind to dream of things that never were and ask why not. Why not have a war in Iran? You won't know until you give it a try.
Using somebody's stuff is different than hot-linking directly to a hosted version of it, even just from the perspective that dude could delete it at any time and break the whole app.
Are you aware that common libraries like Bootstrap, FontAwesome, and HTMX walk developers through linking to their CDNs directly? In fact, FontAwesome recommends it for CDN performance.
I think you're dangerously mistaken if you believe that it "literally never" happens. It literally does happen all the damned time. And, for your own safety and others', you should assume that when you use any app for which you don't have the source code.
Linking to a CDN is for development only. Once the app is build you build your dependencies into the app. You don't fetch them at runtime and run them. Not only for security, but also for performance.
There's also a difference between using a CDN for, say, React and a random github project hosted by some dude.
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but in case you are: There is a difference between (re)using other people's open sourced code, hopefully reviewed, and giving anyone in control of the third party repository the ability to run arbitrary code on your user's devices. Even if the "random GitHub repo" doesn't contain any malicious code right now, it may well contain some tomorrow.
Completely agree. This is really unique. Can you imagine if it were standard practice to be open to supply chain attacks like that, by blindly relying on hotlinked or unpinned dependencies?
Why imagine? Let's take a quick look at what's actually happening right now. We can check some widely used libraries and see what their instructions are teaching new developers.
Pay close attention, they are inviting the new developer to link not just to Bootstrap, but to Popper!
HTMX (code snippet from their quick start guide):
```
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/htmx.min.js"></script>
<!-- have a button POST a click via AJAX -->
<button hx-post="/clicked" hx-swap="outerHTML">
Click Me
</button>
```
Fontawesome: A video quick start guide and instructions that recommends using the direct link to the kits via CDN for performance!
Look, I certainly don't think they should be used this way. But, to say that it's unique to the White House app? I definitely wouldn't say that. In fact, I think you've dangerously overestimated the status quo.
I was being sarcastic. Although hot linking is not particularly common, it's common enough; and unpinned dependencies are just as much if not more of a supply chain attack risk.
I'd bet something like 70+% of all JS apps are inadequately protected against the risk of a malicious actor gaining access to a dependency's repo.
Pearlclutching over this while ignoring the lessons of `left-pad` and `colors` is biased motivated reasoning at best.
I'm not sure I follow. How does an integrity check help when the source is compromised? The developer doesn't know that their repo is compromised. They continue posting legitimate hashes because the repo is legitimately compromised.
there are several corpo open source ai apps that have rce built in.
to cut a long story short they pull their config from the developer's server on startup. that config has user level permissions giving rce.
some have no rce but get remote executed exfiltration of all the prompts. the app pulls its posthog config on startup and can just take all the keyboard inputs.
submit a disclosure and they do nothing or accuse of 'ai slop reports' despite being vibe coded themselves
It's always a better idea to make a local copy of it.
Imagine they're downloading a project directly from your GitHub account. Even if you're not doing anything malicious and have no intention of doing anything malicious even after you've been aware of this, now all of a sudden your GitHub account / email is a huge target for anyone that wants to do something malicious.
All good for you to make those choices for yourself. Your response seems to be show ignorance of all the recent supply chain attacks that have occurred. You can imagine that given the situation with the shoe gifts that many high up members of the administration and cabinet members are running this app.
I'm well aware of supply chain attacks. But this isn't a supply chain attack. If it were, the article would be way more interesting.
The supply chain attack articles are interesting exactly because this is so common. So what's special here other than it being loosely related to a disliked political figure? HN isn't supposed to be an especially political website.
"A common app is doing the same thing that basically every other app is doing."
Is that a good headline? No. And this isn't a good article.
> I'm well aware of supply chain attacks. But this isn't a supply chain attack. If it were, the article would be way more interesting.
It's an article that includes coverage of the exposure to supply chain attacks, mainly via directly linking in https://lonelycpp.github.io/react-native-youtube-iframe/ifra.... You seem to be flippantly dismissing this as insignificant given the people who are probably running this app.
> HN isn't supposed to be an especially political website.
Yes but when technology and politics cross paths...
There's nothing you could exploit here. There's nothing special about this app. This article is about nothing. Not politics and not technology.
If you enjoy reading about how a guy smelled another guy's underpants and discovered that they smell like everyone else's, then rest assured, you can continue reading it over and over again if you like. I'm not able to down vote, so your enjoyment is safe from my opinion.
If he finds something interesting in there (I hope he does), and writes another article I might miss it, unfortunately, because I've written him off as a trash piece author.
EDIT: I went to use this as an example. Hilarious, this blog now has a bad SSL cert, just to put the icing on the cake.
For an Android game downloaded from the Play store I wouldn't find these findings surprising at all. But from an official app from the White House? Well ok, from THIS White House - you're completely right to expect that.
Lol, this is a really funny take. I'm imagining Joe Biden or George Bush asking, "did you check it for supply chain vulnerabilities?"
The DoD has been hacked countless times, by children even. I wouldn't doubt if we decompiled most government apps we'd find this same vector in many of them.
It seems like this vector is only recently a hot topic. And decades of doing things wrong won't be patched and habits broken in short time. It will take a few years to get the majority of it, and decades after that to get the next majority, and so on.
Come on, you're defending a sinking ship ;). Trump might be right about a lot of things, but that doesn't make him right about everything. And he and his whole administration pretends he is. And it's just pathetic and laughable how they try to keep denying how their decisions where maybe not always the wisest or most responsible. I think that is just very unprofessional, and just plainly simply childish. And I think it's becoming more and more clear that that is actually the way it is. The worse it gets the more they go in denial and the more they blame the woke democrats for everything that's their failures. They just don't know what responsibility is and only know how to turn around the narrative to blame others and to make it seem like they're the best ever. You just can't make this stuff up. But I'm actually enjoying it, because they're falling now and they're gonna fall hard. Interesting times.
So what's your point? Because previous administrations also make mistakes, we should accept all the crap coming from the current administration? That seems to be the only defense of the Trump fans these days.
Again, I agree that pervious admins were also crap, but that isn't an excuse for the current administration. We should be critical and sceptical regardless. And I think this current admin is actually worse, even so they tried so hard (or at least pretents) to fix everything. But it's all the same, left of right, they're all fooling us, and have us fighting among each other, so we don't see what's really happening behind the stage.
Companies that sell app development don't write an app from scratch for every one of their customers. They have a template that includes basic functions that are relevant for marketing. May not be needed for everyone, but why would they bother removing it without pay? That's what you're looking at here.
It's vanilla nothing, sprinkled with your political heroes, stirred and served to you on HN.
Enjoy bro. If you liked the article, read it again. It's even more Trump related the second time!
Are those references to 45 and 47 "Easter Eggs" to Trump's presidency number(s)? As in, forty-five-press (45th president) and Version 47.x.x (47th president), as well as the text message hotline (45470).
I've worked on a three letter sports orgs (one of NFL, NBA, NHL, etc) Android app.
I always joke that we could probably tell you what color and type your underwear is on any random day with how much data is siphoned off your phone.
As for loading random JS, yeah also seen that done that before. "Partner A wants to integrate their SDK in our webviews." -> "Partner A" SDK is just loading a JS chunk in that can do whatever they want in webviews, including load more files.
Don't get me started on the sports betting SDKs...
Though we do have a Security team constantly scanning SDKs and the endpoints for changes in situations like this.
> As for loading random JS, yeah also seen that done that before.
Partner A is not random JS. The assumption there is 1) you have some official signed agreement with them and 2) you've done your due diligence to ensure you can use them in this way.
It's not just some person's GH repo who can freely change that file to whatever they want.
Hotlinking is as old as the internet, and a well-worn security threat.
True for any random game app in the Play store, and flashlight and note apps. But well reputable companies don't put too much weirdness into their apps.
