And we wonder why such a high % of tech workers have a deep discontent & are desperately searching for meaning.
Here, the goal is to prevent phishers, fraudsters, scammers, spammers, catfish, impersonators, malware spreaders, etc. from running amok in a somewhat unprecedented way by tricking users en masse into thinking they're really receiving photos/videos in real-time, using automated tooling. My understanding is this heavy degree of obfuscation (combined with other anti-tampering tactics) has gone a very long way to mitigate a huge amount of abuse.
From talking to people who've tried to bypass these mechanisms to do unauthorized and potentially risky things (like send things from a custom client in a way that could allow for mass automation), they describe this as an essentially intractable hurdle from their perspective. Of course, it isn't in actuality, but it is for most people when compared to lots of other social media apps, and I expect Snap to change things around not long after OP releases part 2. Cat-and-mouse never ends.
Which is STILL in the service of trying to expose users to ads and sponsored content.
I find it sad that people in our industry are so easily distracted by the technical challenge du jour without looking at the bigger picture of what their work is in service of, which was OP's point.
I agree with you; hence one of many reasons why I personally wouldn't want to work at Snap, for example. I guess just relative to the other things going on there, this at least is for a good cause at the object level, so if I were somehow forced to work there, I'd probably prefer this over product development, and, more importantly, I'd consider the goal of it a lot more worthwhile and good.
>I find it sad that people in our industry are so easily distracted by the technical challenge du jour without looking at the bigger picture of what their work is in service of, which was OP's point.
No, I was specifically disagreeing with OP's point: I was saying the meaning comes from preventing the abuse, rather than the enjoyment of the tech parts. The technical challenge justification was what I was trying to counter, though I maybe didn't make it clear enough. It's not about the tech, but the bigger picture of what the tech is in service of, even if that particular bigger picture is smaller than the overall big picture of the app and company as a whole.
That is, preventing malevolent people, and, in many cases, criminals, from exploiting, harassing, stealing from, and abusing users (many of whom are very young) in various ways. I think even if it were a company that was a million times less ethical, that'd still be a worthy thing to do, given that the company is probably going to exist and have lots of potentially vulnerable users either way.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, you're still helping the corporation and keeping it in existence, yes. But I also don't think they're some dystopian corporation or something in this case. I myself personally do very deeply hate advertising, advertisements, adtech, whatever, you name it, but your phrasing of "what their work is in service of" makes it sound like Monsanto or something. They're not even anywhere near Facebook's level of badness (as far I'm aware, at least).
They make a fun app with a fun new communication paradigm that lots of people enjoy using, and they're trying to monetize it with ads. I'm not a fan of the app or the business model, but there are tons of way worse things in the world.
that's an odd position to take. You seem to be ignoring the philosophy behind the cat&mouse game that is RE (and Security Engineering in general). What you call cosplaying Sisyphus is to me one of the most rewarding aspects of Tech. Breaking things especially is fun when somebody has made an effort to lock things down (and maybe even claimed it's "unhackable"). This is an area where you're still paid to solve puzzles and where taking the long-view matters. RE is complex and hard but exactly because of this it's one of the most rewarding things in all of CompSci.
There's no doubt they have skilled security staff, but - as a company overall - they also grew very quickly.
How much of that obfuscation is intentional and how much might just be old code from a few years ago that nobody got around to removing? Before it was passed through obfuscation.
Do you think the same thing of anti-spam teams too? This is pretty much just anti-spam/anti-abuse.
There is a rare case where people watch clickbait ads for hours but that's usually plugged in laying in bed with nothing better to do
What a blast that must be... though the immense amount of [invested|wasted] (take your pick depending on cynicism) effort spent on this game makes me a little sad. All of these brilliant minds just... cosplaying Sisyphus?