Are you at all aware of the actual details of this incident?
Tesseract is open source, no?
It was an intentionally obfuscated line of code that pulled a file direct from his server. A file that was intentionally not in the repo so they nobody would know about it. In IT, we call that malware.
To begin with: Apps using such lists make it very clear upfront what they are doing. NOBODY OBFUSCATES THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE LIST.
The list can also easily be a part of the repo that’s pulled at runtime. Or viewable and modifiable from within the app itself.
It wasn’t encrypted.
It’s a client side app, by definition there’s no easy way to encrypt it. Dude certainly gave it a shot by base-64 encoding it. There was no technical reason to encode a text file.
Are you at all aware of the actual details of this incident?
It was an intentionally obfuscated line of code that pulled a file direct from his server. A file that was intentionally not in the repo so they nobody would know about it. In IT, we call that malware.
How else could such list work? New Tesseract release for every update to the filter? It wasn’t encrypted.
To begin with: Apps using such lists make it very clear upfront what they are doing. NOBODY OBFUSCATES THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE LIST.
The list can also easily be a part of the repo that’s pulled at runtime. Or viewable and modifiable from within the app itself.
It’s a client side app, by definition there’s no easy way to encrypt it. Dude certainly gave it a shot by base-64 encoding it. There was no technical reason to encode a text file.
It was disclosed through user agreement and docs for admins hosting Tesseract. List wasn’t encrypted. We’re going in circles now.
People are allowed to have political opinions and they’re allowed to express them through software. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.