So that White House App they just released? this won't come as a shock but hoo boy is it a treasure trove of terrible security and outright fraud to mine your data and track your location

#WhiteHouse #Trump

https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

The official White House Android app:

Injects JavaScript into every website you open through its in-app browser to hide cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, signup walls, upsell prompts, and paywalls.

Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal's servers.

Loads JavaScript from a random person's GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app's WebView.

Loads third-party JavaScript from Elfsight (elfsightcdn.com/platform.js) for social media widgets, with no sandboxing.

Sends email addresses to Mailchimp, images are served from Uploadcare, and a Truth Social embed is hardcoded with static CDN URLs. None of this is government infrastructure.

Has no certificate pinning. Standard Android trust management.

Ships with dev artifacts in production. A localhost URL, a developer IP (10.4.4.109), the Expo dev client, and an exported Compose PreviewActivity.

Profiles users extensively through OneSignal - tags, SMS numbers, cross-device aliases, outcome tracking, notification interaction logging, in-app message click tracking, and full user state observation.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Want to read screenplays? Here is a link to a free book with 9 short scripts of diverse genres. The first, After The Silence, is the sad and melodramatic story of a woman who speaks out about the abuse she experiences in her home, but no one believes her. It is set in a small town of Uganda, and can be read as a handbook of what a victim of domestic violence would go through to get justice in a such a place.

https://www.ododopress.com/screenplays/home-is-a-fine-place-to-die/
#writing #writers #writingcommunity #books #bookstodon

BigAI is not just job loss, digital imperialism, environmental harm and a widening wealth gap. It's an emerging cognitive crisis.

We know this predatory industry seeks to engineer a dependency on 'cognitive offloading', but it's kids that may be taking the real hit. The use of this software may be robbing children of critical developmental milestones, weakening growing brains in ways that could prove to be irreversible.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

#ai #enjoythinking

"Astronomy educates the public; astronomy trains a data- and technology-centred workforce; astronomy supports other sciences, providing a laboratory to physicists and a chance to investigate other worlds to biologists and geologists; astronomy inspires curiosity and art and interest in science; astronomy involves big projects; astronomy gets people out into nature; astronomy is an international field, with global collegiality; astronomy adds to the repository of human knowledge. These are the aspects of astronomy that we should be regularly reminding our elected representatives about."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02830-9

#astronomy #astrophysics #LightPollution #satellite #megaconstellations #spaceX #ReflectOrbital #billionaires

#LivePouet #NimporteNawak

Pour ceusses qui aiment le oldstyle !