Category: Technology

Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update – Malwarebytes Labs

In a single update, a popular barcode scanner app that had been on Google Play for years turned into malware.

Source: Barcode Scanner app on Google Play infects 10 million users with one update – Malwarebytes Labs

“Barcode Scanner” had 4+ stars in 74,000 reviews. Instead of making a statement as to the trustworthiness or usefulness of the application, it became a giant target; a vulnerability to exploit by taking over the application’s distribution, and then putting a trojan into it.

Every significant review system is being gamed to the point of being unusable, and yet stories about not being able to trust them keep being reported as if this were somehow noteworthy. For every one of these stories that rises to a thread on HN, how many other small time vendors are getting screwed by someone who is willing to pay a room full of people in some 3rd-world country to tarnish their competitors’ products?

“Apps” and “algorithms” seem to be driving literally everything about society now. I don’t think this is a good thing, nor do I see the trend reversing. These giant black boxes now control the levers of modern society, and the companies that own them get to hide behind their “terms of service” to avoid any responsibility for the damage being done.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, as a site, at this point, is at best “weird,” if not downright user hostile. The problem with all of these web 3.0 businesses (because of capitalism in general) is that they keep growing until they absorb everything that touches on their core product, ruining the thing that made them interesting to begin with.

It would seem that someone could take up building what LinkedIn started out to be, before it became “Facebook, FOR BUSINESS!”, and then just let it run, to collect the money from recruiters, and leave it alone. Is it even possible to do? Is there no one who could build a lifestyle business on this idea, and not try to take over the world?

I suppose you’ll tell me that the network effects are already effectively preventing entry into the market, and anyone ruthless enough to punch through that barrier would, by nature, want to try to take over the world. And, even if they didn’t want to, eventually, if successful, someone would throw enough money at them to get them to part with it, and be absorbed by the Borg anyway.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Tucked inside the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 is one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet: Section 230.This comes somewhat as a surprise, since the original purpose of the legislation was to restrict free speech on the Internet. The Internet community as a whole objected strongly to the Communications Decency Act, and with EFF’s help, the anti-free speech provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court. But thankfully, CDA 230 remains and in the years since has far outshone the rest of the law.

Source: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act | Electronic Frontier Foundation

I just read a TechDirt article condemning CBS’ 60 Minutes for disinformation regarding Section 230, which led me to the EFF’s page and infographic.

I respect the EFF immensely, but I remain unconvinced.

The EFF claims that if we didn’t have Section 230, places like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter would effectively be sued out of existence. Or, even if they don’t get sued out of existence, they’ll have to hire an army of people to police the content on their site, the costs of which will drive them out of existence, or which they will pass on to users.

I don’t see what’s so valuable about Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter that these places should be protected like a national treasure. All three are proof positive that allowing every person to virtually open their window and shout their opinions into the virtual street is worth exactly what everyone is paying for the privilege: nothing. It’s just a lot of noise, invective, and ad hominem. And if that were the extent of the societal damage, that would be enough. But all of this noise has fundamentally changed how news organizations like 60 Minutes work. Proper journalism is all but gone. In order to compete, it’s ALL just noise now.

The EFF compares a repeal of Section 230 to government-protecting laws in Thailand or Turkey, but this is every bit as much disinformation as TechDirt claims 60 Minutes is promulgating. Repealing Section 230 would not repeal the First Amendment. People in this country could still say whatever they wanted to about the government, or anything else. Repealing 230 would just hold them personally accountable for it. And I struggle to understand how anyone — given 20 years of ubiquitous internet access and free platforms — can conclude that anonymity and places to scrawl what is effectively digital graffiti has led to some sort of new social utopia. The fabric of society has never been more threadbare, and people shouting at each other, pushing disinformation, and mistreating others online 24×7 is continuing to make the situation worse.

Platforms are being used against us by a variety of bad actors. The companies themselves are using our information against us to manipulate at least our buying behavior, and selling our activity to anyone who wants to buy it. There was some amount of alarm raised when it was discovered that AT&T tapped the overseas fiber optic cables for the NSA, in gross and blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, but once discovered, Congress just passed a law to make it legal, retroactively. Now the NSA and FBI doesn’t need to track us any more. Literally every company in America which has a web site is helping to collate literally everything we do into a dossier that gets amalgamated and traded by 3rd-party information brokers. Our cell companies and ISP’s merge location tracking into the mix, and the government picks this information up for pennies on the dollar for what it would take for them to collect it themselves.

I don’t like this situation. I think it should stop. I think anything that would put a dent in Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit being able to collate and track everything anyone does on the internet, and sell it to anyone with a checkbook, needs to go away. If repealing Section 230 forces these companies out of business, I say, “Good.” They want to tell me that the costs to deal with content moderation in a Section 230-less world would put them out of business. I call BS.

If Facebook and YouTube can implement real-time scanning of all video being uploaded to their sites, and block or de-monetize anything containing a copyrighted song within seconds, they can write software to scan uploaded content for offensive content too. Will it catch everything? Of course not, but it will get the load down to the point where humans can deal with it.

There are countless stories of how Facebook employs a small army of content moderators to look into uploaded content, and how it pays them very little, and the job of scanning the lower bounds of human depravity is about as grinding a job in the world. But if they can create filters for pornographic content, they can create filters for gore and violence, and, again, stop 90% of it before it ever gets posted.

Don’t tell me it’s impossible. That’s simply not true. It would just cost more. And, again, if it costs so much that it puts them out of business? Well, too bad. If the holy religion of Capitalism says they can’t sustain the business while they make the effort to keep the garbage off their platforms, then I guess the all-powerful force of The Market will have spoken. The world would be better off without those platforms.

I remember an internet that was made of more than 5 web sites, which all just repost content from each other. It was pretty great. People would still be free to host a site, and put whatever they wanted to on it. It couldn’t be any easier, these days, to rent a WordPress site now, and post whatever nonsense you want, like I’m doing right here. You could even still be anonymous if you want. But your site would be responsible for what gets posted. And, if it’s garbage, or it breaks the law, you’re going to get blocked or taken down. As so many people want to point out in discussions of being downvoted for unpopular opinions, The First Amendment doesn’t protect you from being a jerk.

Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and Google are all being gamed. As the last two Presidential elections have shown, world powers are influencing the content on these sites, and manipulating our national political discourse. This needs to stop. It seems to me that repealing Section 230 would cause those platforms to get serious about being transparent about where that content comes from, and be held accountable for it. Again, don’t tell me that they can’t. They just don’t want to spend the money to do so. In fact, they’re making money on the spread of such propaganda. Tell me why Americans should put up with these mega-companies making billions providing a platform to be used against us politically? Not just allowing it, but being financially incentivized into providing it? It doesn’t make any sense to me.

In summary, I don’t see how repealing Section 230 hurts any of the scenarios that folks like the EFF say that it does, and it would seem to hold all the right people accountable for the absolute disgrace that social media has become.

Get Ready for Your Streaming Services to Merge

If Netflix and Disney are the de facto primary services to which subscribers pay a monthly fee to avoid cable, then that leaves little room for other services to squeeze their way in. At some point, the cost of maintaining multiple services will exceed what somebody would otherwise pay for cable, which doesn’t make a lot of economic sense for someone trying to cut the cord. There’s also only so much content that anyone can reasonably watch. Particularly for households on a budget, it makes more sense to subscribe to just a handful of services that provide value than it does to pay a large monthly fee to maintain subscriptions that aren’t being used.

Source: Get Ready for Your Streaming Services to Merge

That’s a load of horse puckey. I was paying for cable TV with the everything-but-premium-channels lineup, and I seem to recall that was something like $80/mo. Since stopping HBO Max, and given that Prime is essentially free (because I’d pay for it for the free shipping alone), I’m only at Netflix, Disney, and Hulu+. Together, that’s about $45, and that’s enough content that I get overwhelmed with choice. Even if you threw in the cost of HBO and Prime, I’d just be where I started, and arguably with a lot more content than just “cable TV.” For DANG sure, it’s a LOT more content that I want to watch.

I don’t mind saying that I always resented the “ESPN tax,” and they way they bundled it so that you basically either have the legally-mandated, minimum, “survivor” cable, or you stop before the premium channel packages, leaving this huge gap open, and essentially forcing you to carry a bunch of channels you could not possibly care less about. I mean, shopping channels? Are you serious? With the internet in every hand in America, how are those even still a thing? So, yeah, I hope cable companies are doing terribly right now, but a buddy of mine was just saying that they’re going to start consolidating these services — and we all know they will — and we’re going to be right back where we started, paying for a bunch of stuff no one cares about to, say, watch the Office, amirite? They can all suck it. I’ll cancel it all before I get roped into another virtual cable company.

I’m pretty sure that Netflix will continue to dominate. They were smart, and got their own production company up and running. Along with their world-class technology stack, they simply don’t need anyone else. Their content is killing it. The Witcher? Cobra Kai? Stranger Things? The Crown? The Queen’s Gambit? Are you serious? They don’t just not need anyone else, they’re setting the pace for custom content. Apple TV has made some great stuff too. The Morning Show? Defending Jacob? They just need more.

What’s fascinating about this situation is how the big 3 are floundering. These cable-package protected companies are going to have to change their mindsets about the content they produce, when it’s not about charging for advertisement airtime in real time for a single viewing. Because, when you make a show that flames out as badly as, say, Lost, you get one round of sales, and that’s it. You’re not going to sell DVD’s or digital seasons of that show, because it’s a turd, and everyone knows it now. It’s gone down the memory hole. Heroes, for NBC, was the same story. Battlestar Galactica, for Sky, was another. Shows with unbelievable starts, which were allowed to be run into the ground by their runners. No, if you want to sell subscriptions to a service based on your content, you have to create content that people are going to want to watch a couple or few times, and that’s going to take better selection of producers, directors, and writers than any of them have right now.

What I can’t fathom is why Disney hired J.J. Abrams for Star Wars Episode VIII, and then acted surprised when he made a continuity-destroying turd that couldn’t be salvaged despite half of Episode IX being used to retcon it. There will be no boxed set of all 9 episodes on DVD, commemorating the canonical Star Wars story, because it fell apart at the end like a tower of Legos. It’s done. They bought their gross in the theaters, and it’s over. No one’s going to buy the DVD’s or the digital library entries, and Disney can’t use it as leverage to sell their service. No, you go get one of the magic guys from the Marvel universe, get him to make The Mandalorian, and you use THAT to sell your service.

(And it does HBO no service to have hitched their wagon to the DC “cinematic universe.” Like the last 3 Star Wars movies, those are 1-shot viewings too.)

When someone sits down to watch something on a service, they’re not just looking for some thing that optimizes for their mood with something they can watch right now — because that’s what’s airing on real-time programming — they’re optimizing to watch something based against everything else on the service. That’s why The Office is still such a hit. Can you even name another NBC show? I would have given you Agents of Shield, but that’s been pulled back into the Disney mothership (and is no longer considered canon). What defines success in streaming services is much different than what has passed for success in over-the-air and cable programming.

I haven’t seen the article about it yet, but the networks are seriously behind the curve, and I don’t even think they’ve realized how far yet. You have to have a complete plan in place. You can’t just start a show, and then get serious about it when the ratings come in. You have to have a finish in mind. For instance, it’s absolutely clear that the Marvel guys had the big picture in mind for their cinematic universe, and the DC guys were just phoning it in. ALL SHOWS have to have a complete plan at the start these days. You can phase it, but you have to have a complete story ready to shoot, or no one will care about it, and you won’t be able to leverage it to sell a service. Just look at the latest example of The Expanse on Amazon Prime. The first couple of seasons had rave reviews, and now it’s flamed out. You can’t run a show like this any more.

Windows 10 Cloud PC: The latest info about Microsoft’s new service

What is Cloud PC?

Microsoft Cloud PC is a new “strategic offering” built on top of Windows Virtual desktop, which is an Azure-based system used for virtualizing Windows and applications in the cloud.

According to reports, Cloud PC uses Microsoft’s existing Windows Virtual Desktop and Azure infrastructure to deliver Desktop as a Service and enable a modern, elastic, cloud-based Windows experience.

“It will allow organizations to stay current in a more simplistic and scalable manner,” Microsoft noted in a now-deleted job listing.

Source: Windows 10 Cloud PC: The latest info about Microsoft’s new service

Ug. I suppose it’s because I’ve run across Windows being Windows today, and I’m frustrated with it. Again. As always. Of course, I don’t really know what I expected. I feel this way every time I’m forced to use Windows in anger. I mean, it’s Windows. Cue the Arrested Development meme: “I don’t know what I expected.”

#MSBuild a Non-Starter

I’m back on Twitter. Dang it. But it’s cracking me up that Microsoft’s (virtual) developer conference #MSBuild is getting so little attention on the platform.

Compare and contrast this with Apple’s WWDC. There’s more activity with the #WWDC tag right now, and that isn’t for another couple of weeks.

I made a post about the lack of excitement around Microsoft’s conference.

Twitter bubbled that up from my no-name, 2-day-old account to some other rando who responded (nicely). I replied that this basically proved my point, and then THAT response got retweeted by some .NET-oriented bot.

Look, I don’t really like Microsoft, because of their long history in abusing their monopoly position, but their platform has enabled about half of my career, so I still want them to announce cool new stuff, but there’s really nothing going on. They’ve gone to the mattresses to get Visual Studio Code, Windows Services for Linux, and their rewritten terminal accepted by the developers of the world over the past few years. And, sure, there are plenty of fanboys of this development environment, but I just don’t get it.

VSCode is a heavy editor/light IDE, and I don’t want that product. Sublime Text is a blazingly-fast, lightweight text editor, with all the features I need for editing Rails applications. WSL2 is just a Linux virtual machine with hard-coded defaults. I’d rather install VMware or VirtualBox, and take total control of the setup. I get the feeling that the primary users of Microsoft’s latest toys are Javascript developers who are constrained to use Windows because of corporate policies, and, sure, that’s a non-insignificant number of developers in this world.

So far, this seems to be the highlight of MSBuild 2021: Quake mode for Windows Terminal. You know, that gimmicky little feature that popped up in Guake on Linux… <checks Google> 14 years ago? Look, I know it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but “HUGE EARTH-SHAKING?” LOL. No.

Unfortunately, while I was able to install Windows Terminal on my work laptop, the preview build doesn’t install. I don’t know if that’s because of corporate policy or the fact that I’ve got the wrong build of Windows. The company, surprisingly, just updated the build corporate-wide, but I wonder if this requires a preview build. On the other hand, I don’t care enough to sort this out.

About the only thing I want to see from Microsoft is a cross-platform UI widget set that you could use from .NET Core to write native apps across Windows, Linux, and Mac. But people have been clamoring for that for 20 years, and there’s not even a hint that this will ever happen, for a lot of very understandable technical reasons. However, I suppose it’s primarily a function of the age-old scavenging problem. Everyone wants this, but this would open the door for a lot of companies to choose not-Windows for desktops, and Microsoft can’t give up that revenue.

iOS 15 Could Include New Food Tracking Feature – MacRumors

Bloomberg in April also said that there will be notification updates that will allow users to set notification preferences based on current status, which Jewiss says he can confirm. As outlined by Bloomberg, users will, for example, be able to tweak how notifications are delivered when they’re awake, working, sleeping, and more.

Source: iOS 15 Could Include New Food Tracking Feature – MacRumors

I’ve wanted this for 25 years. So much so, that I paid a patent attorney to do a patent search before I was going to try to add this feature to Pidgin on Linux. The lawyer said that IBM was sitting on a large portion of my idea, but couldn’t explain where the wiggle room was, since he was on retainer to them.

I read through the relevant patents, proved to my satisfaction that he was correct, and decided it wasn’t worth my time to pursue. However, I also thought about just going ahead and adding the functionality anyway, and seeing where it all went, but I wimped out on that too.

In any case, I’d still love to have the capability to do this, even 2 decades after I came up with the idea. I don’t understand how this isn’t a thing already. I mean, IBM saw the embryonic concept enough to patent it, years before I ever thought about it. Why has no one ever implemented this yet?

Smart Pipe | Infomercials | Adult Swim – YouTube

Everything in our lives is connected to the internet, so why not our toilets? Take a tour of Smart Pipe, the hot new tech startup that turns your waste into valuable information and fun social connectivity.

This is no longer a joke, proving, once again, that humor is dying, as there is nothing left to parody.

Behold, an actual incarnation of the joke, just 7 years later.

Scientists believe that a new groundbreaking loo, dubbed Smart Toilet, that takes photos of your poo will be a gamechanger for millions and their health.

It will be able to examine your poo with an algorithm and warn your doctor of any problems that could help keep the nation healthy.

Source: Groundbreaking smart toilet takes photos of poo to send to doctors for analysis

I did a double take to check the date, and make sure it wasn’t April 1st. No doubt, the monetization plan for this product is not only to provide a service, but become the de facto monopoly player in poo analysis, and then? I don’t know. Probably put a screen on the back of the toilet, and sell advertising, tied to your stool analysis, as well as everything else. Imagine the investor pitch: “More people have toilets than even have cell phones! The market is truly unlimited!”

SMH.

Safari and Text Rendering

I take font rendering pretty seriously. Back in my 19-year Linux phase, I’ve changed dozens of machines from one Linux distro to another based on nothing more than font rendering on my main machine.

In my current 7-year Mac phase, I use my MBP on an external, 4K monitor, in high-DPI mode. At least, I think that’s what it’s called. It’s where the UI elements are the same size as in high-def, but the fonts are rendered in (technically, almost) “retina” resolution. I’ve had this monitor for several years, but, every once in awhile, I still catch myself thinking, wow, this desktop is beautifully rendered.

Stack Overflow is a site I use basically every working day. Recently, every time I go to the site, I think to myself that the fonts look a lot better, for some reason. I finally dug around a little, and found that they changed their default font to use your system’s default a week ago. On macOS, this default is San Francisco, which I have loved since Apple first introduced it. I’ve even gone so far as to try to put a free version of the font on Windows, but this works about as well as you’d expect, which is to say it’s almost good.

This looks amazing to me. The meta discussion about the change is filled with hate, but I freaking LOVE it. It makes me want to look around for a theme on this site that will render fonts in San Francisco too. (UPDATE: I just switched it back to a theme I had already customized to use it. It looks great on macOS, of course, but it just doesn’t look very good on Windows. Maybe I need to hook my work laptop into the external monitor before I really judge it.)

Looking at the site on my work laptop, I will admit that the fonts don’t look all that great on Windows, under Firefox, or even Edge, so I can understand why all the Windows users are griping, but that’s not Stack Overflow’s fault. I installed Tampermonkey, and the Q+A-linked Roboto+RobotoMono script, and the site looks pretty good now, not that I use it on my other machine much.

It just goes to show how much Windows defaults are terrible. I recall that it would take me many minutes of screwing around with a fresh install of Linux to get things working to taste, but it took hours for Windows. (It takes mere seconds on macOS. There’s, like, 3 things to change: natural scroll direction, double tap clicking, and folders first in Finder.) Some things just don’t change, because they’re not accidental. They are the result of purposeful planning for the benefit of corporate computer fleet owners, instead of end users. Windows users feel this all the time they use the OS, but they hardly ever seem to realize it.

Randomly, since the Roboto font is being referenced, and Mr. Roboto just came up in my music feed, I just want to state for the record that Mr. Roboto is literally one of the top-10 songs ever recorded.