'Coon Cave

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I really wonder when Android is going to implode under all of the technical debt, it’s engineers have been diligently piling up. You can’t even write a simple “Hello World” app anymore that just runs on all versions of Android. Well, you probably can, but you can’t publish it on the Playstore unless you target at least SDK level X (changes every year). In order to do so, you are forced to bundle a giant compatibility library (congratz, wasn’t the whole idea of the DEX binary format and that idiotic resource system to squeeze every byte out of the APK files?) and half of your code will deal with figuring out on which OS version it is running and how it should behave.

There’s really no part in Android that’s not an awkward compatibility hack. Playstore included.

So, after being utterly pissed about what Google did with HttpClient v4, I spent yesterday on upgrading to HttpClient v5 (did not notice it coming out of beta in February). Good news is, my SSL spoofing code still works. Curious news is that Google changed something about the logging process (again). Previously, if they detected that you are not on Android, you’d be stuck in an endless CAPTCHA loop. Now you just get a plain HTTP 403 with a details message of “Bad authentication” (which is kinda accurate). Looks like what I initially thought to be a red herring was actually just a bug. Of course, this keeps me from properly testing the new CAPTCHA code path…

Anyway, no reason to be alarmed, this doesn’t affect Raccoon.

Is there any part in Android not fucked up beyond recognition?

Gotta vent, cover your ears.

Huh, the Windows XP source code allegedly leaks and all security experts are concerned. Imagine if the same happened to the Linux source code… oh, wait!

Seriously, we had a consensus for years, that security by obscurity is a bad idea. So if accidentally going open source is a concern now, then maybe that’s a reminder that Microsoft products have always been dangerous, shouldn’t have been used to begin with and it’s high time to migrate away from the Windows platform (yes, that’s costly and annoying, but don’t tell that having your business shut down because you rely on an unreliable system isn’t).

Is there even one component in Android that wasn’t ugly, broken or ill designed from the beginning, hasn’t been buried under at least half a dozen layers of compatibility code since and is still ugly, broken or ill designed today?

Bored, browsing mobile app developer jobs. Surprised that you can pull $100k/year from mobile app development.

Appstore == Rootkit

(ever thought of it this way?)

The ugly little truth about the Google/Apple Exposure Notification Framework

Using the Corona Warn App? You might have helped preventing a catastrophe. Just not the one you thought you did.

Raccoon 4.15.0

• BUGFIX: Download without crashing when Google Play does not include a download auth cookie with the app delivery response.