Slashdot Mirror
The House of Representatives Is Blocking All Apps Using Google's Appspot.com (fastcompany.com)
New reader calewithac writes: In an attempt to stop ransomware attacks, the House's security team has banned all apps hosted on appspot.com from being used on its servers. This means that all appspot hosted apps are inaccessible inside Congress. According to Ted Henderson, the founder of the Cloakroom -- an anonymous messaging app for Capitol Hill staffers -- all of his apps are effectively not available to their target audience.
Or a Congressional Easter Egg.
I would think Cloakroom was the one thing being targeted, because the House or Representatives doesn't want anonymous leaks.
How would ransomware work on a country with a gazillion dollars in debt load? Could they give the debt to the ransomers?
Seems reasonable.
If the app server cannot be relied upon to provide clean (no spyware, trojans, ...) apps, then it is entirely reasonable to block it, and any communications with it.
'Course, since many of the Apple apps have those same "features", spyware, in particular, they should be blocked, also.
GPS tracking, for example, can be used to follow aides from one office to another, or from the floor to an office, making it more difficult to have some of the delicate negotiations often required to make a government work. Same thing with tracking the to/from of texts.
Wonder if any of them need to work on taxes for corporations.
Tell me again how perfect the cloud is: I forget. When you give up security and archiving duties to someone else, some form of auditing is needed. Otherwise you're not getting the efficiency you paid for, and you don't have any way to detect that.
It's how they be. Anything that doesn't make money for a Republican must be destroyed.
hate free speech on the Internet. It's as simple as that.
According to Ted Henderson, the founder of the Cloakroom -- an anonymous messaging app for Capitol Hill staffers -- all of his apps are effectively not available to their target audience.
which means the blocking is working as intended.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Looks like someone has repressed homosexual desires.
Do people still say 'asshat'? That's so 2007.
This is hypocrisy. We rightly are highly critical of Hillary Clinton for the private email server and leaking classified information. Why do we want to make it easier to leak classified information from Congress. How do we know these apps are secure? How do we know the information isn't being leaked to opposing campaigns, to potentially unethical lobbyists, or even to foreign entities? There already are ways to leak information when it needs to be leaked. Normally that involves being an anonymous source for credible members of the media. Why is it bad for Hillary Clinton to have awful security practices but desirable for Congress to have apps designed to leak information? Both are awful ideas.
How about banning DropBox. The CEO as openly stated they they index every file that crosses their servers.
Oh, now I see. Republicans won't ban DropBox because Condi Rice is on its Board of Directors.
My own (huge) institution has banned Dropbox entirely. Instead, a subscription to Box Sync was purchased for everyone. Box Sync encrypts before upload/sync, and then decrypts locally. They literally cannot peer into your files—This is by Design.
Do people still say 'asshat'?
Only asshats do that now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Gee.. that's something new for them. sarchasm
Thats really all this is about? Fuck off
According to Ted Henderson, the founder of the Cloakroom -- an anonymous messaging app for Capitol Hill staffers -- all of his apps are effectively not available to their target audience.
Go fuck yourself Ted and Cloakroom. They can pull out their personal phone and visit your shitty site that no one cares about if they want to.
They can go home and send you posts.
What you're really pissed off about is that they can't easily leak shit to you, and you're crying about how they aren't paying their employees and resources to give you shit you want to then stab them in the back with.
You're a complete and total douche for whining about this.
I'm all for leaking anything illegal or just flat out 'wrong', but I don't expect the party I'm spying on to facilitate it nor to I expect them to make it easy on me.
You think its a good idea for secrets to just flip out to assholes like you and that everyone who 'leaks' shit is intelligent enough to leak the proper stuff and not actual secrets, or is smart enough to never be exploited by random public services that allow anyone and everyone to sign up without any useful chain back to the physical person.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Can somebody explain, what is appspot.com, what is an "app" in this context, and what does it mean for them to be "banned from the House's servers"?
The summary (and TFA) doesn't make any sense to me:
- what does it mean for an "app" to be "hosted on appspot.com" but "used on the House's servers"?
- in what way do restrictions on the House's servers affect what software is or is not "accessible inside Congress", or what software is "available to" Capitol Hill staffers?
- who and what are they trying to protect from ransomware, and how is this move meant to achieve that goal?
My own (huge) institution has banned Dropbox entirely. Instead, a subscription to Box Sync was purchased for everyone.
Dropbox has a client for GNU/Linux OS; Box appears not to because of low demand. Did the price of this "subscription to Box Sync" include a subscription to Windows for Linux users to run in a VM? Or how well does the Box client for Windows work in Wine? Or are you using an unofficial client?
well, I'd guess that, like China, people will start using vpn software to evade the blocks.