Managements always work toward managing towards what they can measure. I’m sure that daily signups are a metric that they track, hence they’ll prioritize signups even at the cost of user frustration and love, something that’s less tangible.
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.
Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets.
Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.
Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at all, is there a way to prevent something like this from happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the app?
You can try, but you won't succeed against a dedicated reverse engineer, simply dropping a hook in on the API calls would be enough to grab the decrypted key in a case like that, if not simply statically reading the encryption keys and decrypting it. That's not to say it's useless - some reversers will simply move on to the next app when there's a list of dozens.
You can also send requests via your own server, which would allow you more control over the requests that get sent out to your 3rd party APIs and just restrict tokens as much as possible to the minimal set of features necessary for your application.
That achieves nothing against someone who uses something like apktool/baksmali to do static RE, let alone inject something like Frida to perform dynamic RE. There are even Xposed modules designed to just bypass certificate pinning.
Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.
Please don't legitimize SafetyNet. It is an existential threat to real ownership of your phone as any flavor of Android but that blessed by Google trips SafetyNet. It's the equivalent of barring people from running software on their laptop because they've installed a flavor of Windows that wasn't shipped from the factory. People everywhere have a right to do with their phone what they want to.
I agree with all your points, but what's the reasonable alternative? There is a reason that apps have decided to go with SafetyNet as a requirement. It dramatically reduces abuse.
Unless an API you're looking at requires/supports attestation via SafetyNet or you're willing to proxy via your own server this is likely not an option.
Additionally, while it's true (to my knowledge) that re-implementing a full safteynet spoof is not currently publicly available, a combination of Frida and MagiskHide is able to bypass SafetyNet for dynamic RE purposes, just launch the app as normal with MagiskHide enabled then attach to it with Frida as root. If they enforce full hardware attestation this may change in the future, but right now we're good.
Quora ended for me when spun/copy+pasted Google results started to replace answers. For example: I asked for the science behind the EPA's recommendations on UV exposure, and the answers were all word-for-word copies of the first result in Google, which had no detail on the science behind it. Just "avoid going out before x," "wear x SPF sunscreen," but nothing about the basis for the recommendations.
That was years ago. Recently, I went looking for how to un-retweet something from an account that has since blocked me, and every single answer on every instance of someone asking that on Quora is more or less a copy of Twitter's documentation for an ordinary un-retweet. Useless search result pollution.
No idea. I used it a while and enjoyed the content, then they changed something in the algorithm and I'd suddenly get basically the same content every single day, often >30% of the feed would be the exact same as the week before. They also removed the list of topics, so there was no obvious way to escape the near static feed.
Not sure what they wanted to achieve with that change, but I never visited the site again.
It's a real shame. I used to really enjoy my daily Quora digest email. One of the only automated emails I truly dug into and read in detail. Over time I read it less and less. Then switched it to be weekly, then turned it off. I miss the old Quora.
It's because they need to start collecting more first-party data from users who land on their site. This is a result of Apple (and others in the future) blocking third-party cookie tracking.
They are doing this SOLELY because of the need for audience creation, marketing attribution, and ad revenue.
They sure do; however, digital media and social in particular, absolutely rely on significant investment in their audiences, attribution, etc in order to drive more revenue and thus higher CPMs. More traditional media (such as OOH, Print, etc) all rely on very high-level metrics such as daily traffic volumes and lack of direct impact evidence in their attribution of value.
This is why Facebook is SO very against what Apple is doing with iOS14+, particularly with cross-device and cross-app tracking opt-in, because they know it will decimate their ability to do what they do today.
Bingo. They need this for user-level measurement and targeting. Wouldn't be surprised if this also supports part of their audience extension work with twitter audience platform as well.
I could imagine they're trying to prioritize things like user retention and ad revenue, both of which can be done better by tracking user behavior. Losing a percentage of their logged out user base could very well be worth it to them in order to increase what helps their business.
This is the kind of thing that kept me off Quora forever. It’s a great resource but I don’t feel like logging in 100% of the time. So now I just ignore all of their links.