hackitfast

joined 2 years ago
[–] hackitfast@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

You are exactly correct

[–] hackitfast@lemmy.world 30 points 1 month ago

I don't think that the founders are bad people. If you look at their history of work, they have done enormous amounts of work in the computer security sector. The founder, however, did run a cloud based WPA cracking service.

Meredith Whitaker, who is the president, used to work at Google doing research for "issues related to net neutrality measurement, privacy, security, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence".

In 2018 she then staged walkouts at Google over concerns of sexual misconduct and citizen surveillance.

The people on Signal's board seem to be trustworthy people with a pretty airtight background. You have to worry more about the mobile operating system compromising you than do you about Signal.

[–] hackitfast@lemmy.world 47 points 4 months ago

Easy: you don't.

Nobody has the balls to chase these ghouls down for illegally accessing information, most especially because our government is the ones enabling them to do this.

[–] hackitfast@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

F-Droid is great, but it's only for FOSS. So it won't host content like TikTok on it.

[–] hackitfast@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (5 children)

APKPure

It looks a little sketchy to me, I'm seeing mixed things on reddit about it.

An alternative application you can use to download Google Play apps is the Aurora Store (https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore), but I think it still obtains the files from Google Play.

 

Currently, you are unable to view the APKMirror web page. Instead, you get the following message shown in the screenshot below.

Tiktok downloads are currently blocked in the United States due to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.

The link in this statement leads to the following page, containing the bill that was passed:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521

This sets a dangerous precedent going forward for the Android community which sideloads applications onto their phones, being that APKMirror is the largest mirror of APKs for Android phones. It's also possible for them to add more apps to be included under this bill, and possible for another bill to be passed which may act as an even more broad blanket to target specific groups of people (e.g. LGBTQ+, people of color), messaging applications that are truly secure (e.g. Signal), and so on.

Then of course there a very real possibility of our president forcing the integration of software updates into both Android (and possibly even iOS smartphones) that can forcibly remove applications for the "sake of national security".


Blocked APKMirror links:

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/tiktok-pte-ltd/tik-tok/

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/tiktok-pte-ltd/lemon8/