Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
Did Rovio use a system already identified as being fraught with privacy concerns? Yes. And as long as it made them money, they didn't pay more than lip service to the issues (just like all the other companies built on Google's system - so don't I'm raging on just Rovio).
It has long been established legal reasoning that people benefiting from an illegality are complicit in that illegality. I consider it hypocritical for Rovio or any other developer to simply say, "Hey, it wasn't us, we just used and profited from the system." Rovio made a choice, at the least they can stand up and show some integrity and tell us they knew this system was bad but they were more interested in the money. At least then I can respect them for being forthright. As it is though, they're as dirty as the rest and liars to boot.
So there's a dark side to advertising. Who knew?
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.
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.
I imagine its a bit more complicated than that since they are not an US company, and I can find not mention of a US office.
And how exactly did Rovio benefit from an "illegality"? First, there's no real evidence of one only vague "we could do it" type information. Second, this is like saying a movie theater profits from piracy if someone comes in and secretly films a bootleg they then go on to sell for millions.
And they really have no excuse to plead ignorance in my opinion. A comment on a related Slashdot article linked an article indicating Mikko Hypponen, "chief research officer" of F-Secure is friends with these guys. You'd think these issues have come up once or twice in conversation.
Goddammit just when I get my first +5 the Beta rolls out and kills everything
Actually I'm still mildly curious about what sorts of information could exist on Angry Birds that the NSA would want. It's not even a social network, there's no private information stored there, no list of friends (at least the one on my phone was not given permission to browse my contacts), no place to write down notes about political dissent. The most they could do possibly is figure out is that there's a high correlation to my playing of Angry Birds and the times of my bowel movements.
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.