• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      8 months ago

      Show me where in the Chrome or Firefox app there is code to download an executable – not a versioned update to the app through the Play Store, but a random chunk of code – and run it.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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          8 months ago

          This is a pretty impressive amount of deflection.

          “All apps on iOS are obfuscated, so it’s not important that TikTok on Android takes extra trouble to obfuscate itself in a very weird way which other Android apps generally don’t do.”

          “All Windows apps work by downloading new binaries for themselves, because there’s no package management, so it’s not important that TikTok on Android takes extra trouble to bypass the package management and enable downloading custom per-user executables and running them.”

          “Some apps have vulnerabilities by accident, so it’s not important that TikTok has a remote code execution vulnerability built in on purpose.”

          “Apps have a security model, which by the way can be jailbroken, so it’s not important if something malicious happens within the app. Actually, forget what I said about jailbreaking.”

          You haven’t actually addressed anything I said, just threw a whole bunch of words about related topics to make it sound like what I described about this particular topic is, within the scope of this topic, a normal thing. It’s not.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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              8 months ago

              Caring about this obfuscation is comical and directly leans into my point about laymen getting scared by things every app does.

              I think we’re done here. I could repeat myself but it would be a waste of both our time.

                • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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                  8 months ago

                  I looked even further into your claims, the zip downloading thing has zero evidence that I can find other than one guy on Reddit.

                  This is a pretty fair point. I think I saw one other analysis that was similar to the reddit guy, but most people who do security analysis of TikTok seem to say that it’s not especially nefarious, or any more so than the other ones (which are all pretty nefarious). I don’t know why I trust this guy and not those guys. I just found it credible and specific on the positive side, where the other side is proving the negative. But yeah, there might be a bit of confirmation bias there.