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ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it
(www.engadget.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
We need a federated equivalent. Anything centralized can be stopped.
At the very least I hope it's hosted by someone outside the US so it's out of reach to the authorities.
For all we know the app might just be a honeypot itself
This is a genuine concern that we should recognize.
I'm about 99% confident it isn't, but considering it is the kind of caution we should all be exercising these days.
How would we learn either way if it was or wasn't?
Someone knowledgeable enough would be able to figure out where every upload is going, I'd wager. But that would take Someone that is knowledgeable enough, as well as willing to expose an app like that given the potential consequences.
That's always worth considering. A phone app doesn't take a big operating budget to launch and maintain. Especially for state-actors.
Federation is an overly complicated solution it's not required. It also wouldn't actually help, they can still take it off the app store there'd be another one but they would just play whack-a-mole and you can achieve the same thing with open source.
The best bet would be to have the database hosted outside the US and just have apps that pull the data from an API. There's no need for the app itself to store the data in fact that's a really stupid way to do it. You could federate it if you wanted but honestly that's probably unnecessary
Honestly yeah, if we can just torrent the database and have it stored outside the U.S then it's good
Facepalm. If the App does not store the data in a 5 mile radius ... how do you at least see the latest status when the power and internet is down?
I can't tell if you're serious or not.
If the internet is down then I don't have access to the app store. Also if the internet's down then the data is going to be out of date almost immediately anyway so any cached version would be useless.