Why in the world would the White House's mobile app need permissions or any kind of interaction with (or even reference to) the Chinese tech giant Huawei, whose products are banned from the United States for concerns about national security, espionage and intellectual property theft? Here's a scan at Virustotal.com of what's bundled in the latest White House app:
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I realize this is small potatoes compared to other dumb/actively harmful stuff this administration is doing, but the POTUS just got done telling the world that China interfered with the election he lost, and here he's mandating that govt workers install an app that has components referencing Huawei??
@briankrebs I think we all picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue
@codinghorror @briankrebs I moved on to grout
@briankrebs Let me guess, some LLM code helper generated some/most/all of this app, and that's what it felt like doing. Quite a skill.
@jab01701mid it's certainly possible, but i would hope that the white house isn't vibe coding on backdoored llms off huggingface that intentionally write vulnerable code if you have the wrong politics, or express an opinion that activates the sleeper agent inside.
but why i think they're capable of understanding anything like that is beyond me 🤦♂️ seeing models activate and start writing intentionally vulnerable code is really alarming. i don't know how effective scanning for this can be.
@briankrebs this in an app that was forced installed on (all?) Federal government employee cell phones! Thanks for looking into it.
@briankrebs Considering that the Trump regime's actions have been more aligned with the strategy foreign policy interests of #China in general, and especially the #CCP in particular, than any other government principal's interests, I suppose it should not be too surprising if the #WhiteHouse app leaks information to #Huawei.
@briankrebs Just a guess: Maybe they distribute the same app also in the Huawei App store and want to use push messages with Huawei smartphones, too... which is of course inconsistent wuth the ban, but well. It's the White House 😉
@briankrebs A lot of that stuff is just thrown in by default by mobile development IDEs, and no-one removes them because they don't really understand what they're for and "don't want to break anything"
