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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Sorry about the late reply.

    I don’t have access to an apk of paid Boost for Lemmy, but this is what Exodus Privacy has to say about it: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.rubenmayayo.lemmy/latest/
    The app does not have Lemmy in the name, but I assume it is the Lemmy version because of its package name

    You can also check it locally by
    a) installing App Manager from F-droid, and when they boost app’s details are opened, use the Scanner feature. It is a larger action button in the vertically scrollable button bar below the app name
    b) export the APK to your computer, and use JADX from github to disassemble the APK. you should be able to see the layered packages and source code of the embedded trackers.

    Yes, what you described is app flavors, and is a feature of the android sdk. However, the dev probably didn’t remove the dependency incisions. Even if they now don’t issue a specific initialization call at app startup, the tracking frameworks have registered their own content providers and broadcast receivers in the androidmanifest file at build time, which will be started at app startup before other components of the app.
















  • Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?

    For programs, that is not a problem.
    This is a problem for data.

    Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.

    If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
    And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.

    Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
    But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.



  • Nothing is hidden, it’s all there

    Yeah, of course, it’s all there in binary. For programs of course that’s not a problem, but for data that you may need to look at any time, it is. It’s harder to interpret both for humans (significantly) and both for any program that want to make use of it (unless they use the specific library that came up with the format, and by that also pulling in all its libs transitively)

    Binary data is not much less obfuscated than the system files of windows. It’s all there, you can read it