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Rovio Denies Knowledge of NSA Access, Angry Birds Website Defaced Anyway
Nerval's Lobster writes "Rovio Entertainment, the software company behind Angry Birds, denies that it knowingly shares data with the NSA, Britain's GCHQ, or any other national intelligence agency. But that didn't stop hackers from briefly defacing the Angry Birds website with an NSA logo and the title
'Spying Birds.' Rovio's troubles began with a New York Times article that suggested the NSA and GCHQ had installed backdoors in popular apps such as Angry Birds, allowing the agencies to siphon up enormous amounts of user data. The Times drew its information from government whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has leaked hundreds of pages of top-secret documents related to NSA activities over the past few months. 'The alleged surveillance may be conducted through third party advertising networks used by millions of commercial web sites and mobile applications across all industries,' Rovio wrote in a statement on its website. 'If advertising networks are indeed targeted, it would appear that no Internet-enabled device that visits ad-enabled web sites or uses ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance.' The company pledged to evaluate its relationships with those ad networks. The controversy is unlikely to dampen enthusiasm for the Angry Birds franchise, which has enjoyed hundreds of millions of downloads across a multitude of platforms. It could, however, add momentum to continuing discussions about the NSA's reach into peoples' lives."
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Rovio Entertainment, Facebook, and others remind me of that Clapper idiot.
So which is it? Do the NSA have my Angry Birds high score or don't they?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Make that, US!
We already saw Saruman using bird for spying in LOTR, but this warning wasn't enough...
Angry Birds: Denial.
To be followed by
2.Anger
3 Bargaining
4 Depression
5 Acceptance.
Can't wait for Angry Birds to Die!
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
It always bothers me when I see comments like "But that didn't stop hackers from briefly defacing the Angry Birds website with an NSA logo and the title 'Spying Birds.' ".
Did they install the backdoor software knowingly? Does it even have it, or is Snowden's reports wrong? Do they deserve some level of punishment at all? These hackers do not know, but they take some comment from the NYT and use that as justification to target someone for punishment. This is the exact reason we have a legal system and outlaw vigilantism; while our legal system is annoyingly frustrating, this kind of vigilante anarchy is not better.
Is anyone not seeing a potential Trojan Horse in this? Am I the only one who is actually concerned about real journalism? Real, as in doing basic fact checking?
Why didn't NYT at least talk to someone who can turn on a computer, once they started the article on their Selectric?
If Rovio Entertainment has any brains, I would be punching back hard at NYT for failing to do 3th grade validation.
6. Candy Crush
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
It seems that the Angry Birds iPhone covers, air fresheners, chew toys, fruit snacks, T-shirts, and cock rings sold at the local drug store have all been replaced by Duck Dynasty variants of the same. I took that to mean that nobody cared about Angry Birds any more.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Next we will learn that temple run is a real time simulation of the public running from NSA agents. Just wait till we get to see the real monster hidden in side of the one chasing you when the mask is taken off. Seriously though, this sucks for Rovio. Someone in the media clearly had an agenda in causing bad publicity for them. Couldn't they have just chosen any app at random and accused them of this. I seriously doubt Rovio is conducting meeting with the NSA on what information they will share.
Other news reports are claiming that the hack may have originated from Syria ....
So perhaps the perpetrators were ..... Angry Kurds
Your analogy and choices are misinformed.
For example Reagan did not necessarily want less government in an absolute sense. He wanted less *federal* government (the national government in the U.S.) but not a vacuum. He wanted some problems and issues to be addressed by state and local government not the federal government.
In other words he thought some issues and some problems were best addressed at a more local level. Especially since some problems and issues have a local component. This was not a uniquely Republican idea either. Kennedy (JFK) also made some similar statements. Democrats of JFK's era were quite different than many of today's Democrats.
I'm not sure who the liars are. I think we are getting to the point where Snowden may be making shit up too.
Seriously, the truth is not some mutually exclusive thing, if one side is lying the other side is truthful. Both sides may be lying/exaggerating/minimizing, the NSA and Snowden.
I think we are past the point where some serious fact checking needs to be done on Snowden claims.
So there's a dark side to advertising. Who knew?
They sort of just disproved their own statement. Does the website defacing prove Rovio put a backdoor in their website for the hackers? No one believes this. So how can the fact that the NSA, presumably with a lot more resources at their disposal than the hackers, can hack something from Rovio prove Rovio must have been involved?
If NSA and the Adverts are getting the info by snooping com links then it is legal.
If NSA payed the Rovio and the Adverts for the info then it is legal.
If Rovio and the Adverts deny receiving payment, then a Federal Complaint can be issued to access their financial holdings, employee payrolls, FTC quarterly reports and IRS records to see if they all balance. If not then Rovio and the Adverts have real problem.
Other than that, better just get over it and move on.
Seems like they would have the money to run a proper website, how could it be defaced so easily?
There's no response that wouldn't cause suspicion.
They can't confirm it because they're gagged under threat of imprisonment or worse.
If they deny it, they were forced to do so upon threat of imprisonment or worse.
If they say nothing, they were gagged under threat of imprisonment or worse.
They can't even confirm it passively by shutting down service or using a virtual dead man switch, as we've seen with the Lavabit case.
The feds will find a way to argue and manipulate the process in their favor. There is no winning move for anyone who receives a NSL or FISC order, they're fucked. And so are we.
And plummet to obscenely low levels. Rovio has hit its zenit.
Any chance this means that mobile OS and mobile app developers might actually start setting up permissions structures that allow apps to function with the minimum necessary privileges?
The permissions framework on Android (and iOS) seems like a reasonable start, but when the norm for a flashlight app is to have full network access and full camera access, it becomes painfully obvious that we as users are not leveraging the frameworks to protect ourselves. If more people cared about Facebook asking for write access to your first-born's soul, they (and other app developers) might have some incentive to build apps that work within the narrowest ruleset possible.
Instead, we have the current disaster, where my stopwatch app requires full network access, Flood-It has full network access *and* access to the contents of the phone's USB storage, etc. Set up an API to allow ads to get pulled in without granting full network access, limit the access the apps have, and it won't matter if the NSA can access your Angry Birds game.
"These hackers do not know"
That statement alone shows how little your miniscule mind and opinion really "knows"
There was a time, not that long ago, when Adware and Spyware were removed by antivirus software on the PC. Move to everyone having a smart phone and Adware has become acceptable but it seems to have been forgotten that much of that Adware is also Spyware... The amount of confidential information that is able to leak from these devices is scary. From something as simple to all your business contacts being accessed by a range of apps to every file on your devices being accessed by some apps. Facebook, and other social media, have largely killed off the concept of privacy for many people. The really scary part is the commercially sensitive business information that can be expose by executives that love their cool new device but don't have a clue about security.
it's full of pigs!
Doesn't matter if it's proprietary software or just adware you want to cut back on (or possibly even eliminate almost entirely if using Replicant), F-droid has you covered. It's not that hard to give Google Apps the flick with all the alternative free software out there, if one can be motivated to do so.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
This is the kind of thing that happens when you trust an application to do what it says on the tin. An OS based on a capability architecture would have made this pretty much impossible.
The NSA doesn't need to target an advertising network; they just need to run advertisements. For more control, they could buy up or create an advertising network. At that point, you've got little recourse because you agreed to all of this at installation or during use.