Angry anti-NSA hackers pwn Angry Birds site after GCHQ data slurp Anti-NSA hackers defaced Rovio's official Angry Birds website on Tuesday night as a reprisal against revelations that GCHQ and the NSA were feasting on data leaked from the popular smartphone game. Spying Birds: Angry Birds defaced by irritated hackers. Angrybirds.com became "Spying Birds" as a result of the defacement ( …
Lol, I had never heard of Godwin's law until mentioned above, OK I will put on my numpty hat and go sit in the corner of the barrel.
I never make any comments regarding Nazis, now that I have I fell straight into the well... We learn something new every day.. That's memetics for ya.
But that's assuming the paid-for don't also have this or similar code. Looking at the permissions required by even paid apps, you can see they are asking for things that have no relevance to the apps core functionality.
Droidwall + AdFree + ApOps/permissions revoked is about as good as you are going to get as long as you are happy to root.
You also forgot about LBE Privacy Guard, and AdAway...
The English Play store version of LBE hasn't been updated since 2012, so your options are either the Chinese version from the Play store or the English hack from XDA. Adaway and AdFree are basically the same so doesn't really matter which you choose as long as the hosts are updated.
ApOps isn't perfect but does a decent job in addition to DroidWall in place of LBE.
I'm thinking more in terms of long term market transformation, or even initial market formation.
The market as it exists is dominated by Marxist freetards. So the only way for software manufacturers to make money is to put in the advertising. Bifrucating the code to take the marketing code out is easy relative, redoing the needed permissions not so much. So what we wind up with is the flaws generated from the Marxist freetards stuck in the paid apps. If the market were dominated by paid apps, there would at least be the possibility of an incentive to write the code with only the necessary permissions required.
Don't know about Rovio, but the advertising skanks used by King (yes, Candy Crush et al I'm looking at you) and Supercell (Hay Day, Clash of Clans, similar crap) have a well-established habit of putting Javascript hijacks into their ads that dump you out of your browser and into the app store on iOS devices. I understand that the same thing happens (or used to happen?) on Android too. In some cases, it's easy enough just to avoid using websites that are afflicted with ads from those networks, but they keep popping up all over the place, depending on which ad network(s) a given site is using at any given time (and on which ads are being syndicated through multiple networks).
Thankfully, there appear to be one or two iOS browser alternatives that block this now, but it's high time that Apple did something to block that behaviour entirely. Google too, if Android is still vulnerable to it.
In any case, given their propensity for such irritating behaviour, is it any surprise that these worthless lickspittles would flog anything that they can find to the highest bidder? Or just hand it over to the Government for the merry hell of it.
Scumbags. If Shakespeare had been around today, he'd probably have written "The first thing we do, let's kill all the advertisers..."
There's a similar thing on Android for download sites (for custom ROMs) where you either get a "download our app" prompt of death, or it automatically downloads an apk for something you declined to download. Sometimes you can end up with multiples from before/after the "click to download", CAPTCHA and "wait 30s to download" page refreshes. Obviously I don't install them, but it's annoying as hell.
"The online advertising industry weakens Internet security, and has created pathways for hackers and gov agencies to exploit" ...... so by that he obviously means Google, one of the biggest if not the biggest Online Advertisment companies ever?
On Android, using xprivacy, lbe, pdroid or app-ops combined with adaway and droidwall or avast firewall gets rid of most of this nonsense. I dont care if the app developer looses ad revenue, my privacy is more important than the 0.002p revenue you might get when i accidently click your oh so convieniently placed ad banner instead of a menu option.
We now also know the real reason that most ad networks want fine/course positioning, contact read/write and call log info dont we?. Deliver targeted ads my arse, log your movements in an nsa database more like.
oh, btw nsa, my phone reports im on Christmas island at the moment, and that will change to a random location next reboot, I really hope your taking into account the amount of savvy users that are faking location (and other) data reported to apps and not just logging virtual worldwide frequent fliers like me as `interesting`.
I love the way Rovio try to weasel out of responsibility for the snooping by blaming the ad network. No Rovio, its entirely your doing, you read the ad networks sdk documentation, you knew what they were going to do with those excessive permissions, cowboy the fuck up and admit it, and then fix it. They wont of course, and the fickle great unwashed will have forgotten all this in a few weeks and be back to downloading games like this without a second thought to what has transpired and how their privacy has been violated.
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