Sure he should take the vulnerability report seriously, but it's pretty clear that bundling a report above the words "activism theater" isn't going to make someone want to read it.
Instead, just "hey man, you're on a vulnerable version of httpd" is likely going to be more effective.
Finding effective, actionable and safe methods is difficult - but that's the work we have to do.
Conflating a software vulnerability with a criticism of the overall concept is a good way to become non-credible and get both ignored
The article repeatedly claims the entire concept is mere "activism theater" yet with zero evidence or even discussion to back up the claims. In fact, this sort of app may be very effective in both helping people evade authoritarian raids and helping generate flash-mob-type protests that impede the authoritarians. Every bit of friction added to authoritarian rule improves the likelihood of successfully defeating it.
And, buried in the vague overall accusations of not liking the app, the author is stating he's using the wrong version of Apache. I missed anything about the actual good version if it was in there. And, he openly admits he has no idea if the server in question even houses any significant data.
The whole article comes off as the author being an asshat, and even more sore that he's being ignored. TBF, I'd probably ignore him too.
But yeah, it probably is a good idea to run the update sooner rather than later.
It appear this app was vibe coded, has no security, now serves a lot of people, and the author is somehow thinking how to make money out of it, hence the reluctance to make the code open source
It's pretty clear that the app has its issues (especially wrt to false reports), that I'm not disputing.
No.
“Joshua runs two Bluesky accounts: @iceblock.app, the account of the ICEBlock app, and @joshua.stealingheather.com, Joshua's personal account. His personal account had DMs closed, but the ICEBlock account had DMs open, so [the author] sent him DMs there” about the upcoming blog post.
Joshua reacted to the blog post by blocking the author on the ICEBlock account.
When, “a few days later…[ICEBlock’s] server was still running Apache 2.4.5,” the author “decided to give [Joshua] a deadline to patch his server before [the author] publicly disclosed the vulnerability.” The author sent this deadline to Joshua’s “@joshua.stealingheather.com” account.
“An hour and a half” after the deadline was communicated, Joshua blocked the author from his personal account, too.
Now, the blog post seems to be reasonable criticism to me so I don't think the developer should have blocked him for it. But I don't know, no one has ever written a blog post about me, and I'm not receiving death threats and being threatened by the federal government.
At the end of the day, the author is trying to frame this interaction along the lines of, "Sensitive user data is at risk, and I was blocked for no reason other than for letting the developer know" -- the first part has not been proven to be true, and the second is obviously not true.
The point is the developer didn’t block “the author after seeing them link a blog post.” They received the disclosure and then blocked the author (on that account).
https://micahflee.com/unfortunately-the-iceblock-app-is-acti...
World’s biggest clickbait title backfire?
I do agree with other people’s sentiment here: author is not wrong, but did not really do the most effective thing if their goal was actually to get the ICEBlock author to secure the app. If someone is going to act like a petulant child when confronted with evidence they need to fix something, they need to be treated like a child. And starting off the conversation as combative is going to make the child respond in kind.
Either don't collect anything useful or at least host the server somewhere where a US warrent doesn't as easily work as cutting butter with a hot knife...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
Hopefully it doesn't end up doing more harm than good
It’s also not wrong.
The app doesn’t seem designed to do what it claims to do. And the developer doesn’t seem interested in remedying that.
Worse, by hosting this on linode, they may be doing our corrupt DoJ and ICE’s work for them in identifying community organizers who could interfere with them down the road.
If you're running a service that handles sensitive user data and need a third party to tell you how to update your web server, you shouldn't be handling such data at all.
Personal data leaks from apps like this are only going to become more common (especially considering the rising popularity of "vibe coding") unless the people behind them are forced to take responsibility for their lack of security.
To be fair, this is exactly the sort of response I'd expect from a political activist who made an app that helps illegal immigrants evade the law.
To people like him, the world is fully black and white. Any words spoken to them that aren't unconditional agreement and praise will be interpreted as an direct attack from the far opposite end of the political spectrum, and met with hostility. If anything, this reaction was relatively mild.
followed by
> this is exactly the sort of response I'd expect from a political activist
I mean thats also pretty black and white as well, right?
Not really. I'm not making assumptions, just recognizing the behavioral pattern after the fact.
The creator of the app could've just quietly patched the issue and moved on, and we wouldn't be discussing it here. But instead, he clearly chose to assume the worst and immediately go on the offensive, perfectly matching every experience I've ever had of trying to have a good-faith discussion with such activists.
Were I building something that I would want to assert the level of privacy claims that ICEBlock asserts, I would absolutely be taking any/all reports about security extremely seriously.
Maybe I missed it, but was it ever established that these general vulnerabilities are actually relevant to this specific system/implementation?
I can't help but feel that the author's motivation was to get some sort of reaction, and now they've gotten it. If this vulnerability was so vital to be patched, why would it be bundled into a "by the way" DM on Twitter along with a post heavily criticizing the app developer? Both people involved can be idiots here.
Just like the legendary brown M&Ms, it might be an indicator of worse stuff.
I assume this means that the author of this post has seen the Debian version in their nmap. The latest version of which would be 2.4.65-1~deb12u1[1]. You'll notice that there is a Debian version number attached to the Apache version number which means that the version number NMAP found doesn't necessarily mean software is unpatched. I've never used Iceblock or talked to this developer but I have no doubts he's dealing with beg bounties[2], harassment, and bad faith critique of his software which the screenshotted messages look like.
EDIT: For the sake of clarity, I think I should have phrased it the other way around. Bad faith messages look like the ones the author sent. I'm not discussing the actual intention of the messages but the pattern seeking brain's reception to them.
[1]: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/a...
2.4.57 never made it into Debian stable, only went as far as testing and unstable.
2023-10-19 was when 2.4.57 was superseded by 2.4.58 in unstable.
So assuming they are not using RHEL or similar, they have either pinned Apache httpd, used a custom build, or haven't updated their server since the start of 2024.
- - -
Since then, there have been 11 moderate, 8 important security fixes according to Apache.
The vulnerability couldn’t have been reported in a worse way. OP gave unreasonably short deadlines, allowed moral opinions about the software to interfere with responsible disclosure, and interspersed details about the potential vulnerability with inflamatory remarks about the mission of the product. I don't think OP's goal was actually to secure the app.
OP was going to publish a scathing blog post about ICEBlock either way, and essentially engineered a situation where the ICEBlock author had to act within unreasonable timelines. He published the original blog post an hour and a half after reporting the vulnerability. Then gave a week’s deadline before another one.
Sure, potentially the ICEBlock author also allowed feelings to interfere with upgrading the vulnerable version too.
But ICEBlock has millions of users, according to the blog post. I’m cautious about upgrading dependency versions for apps I manage with <100 internal users. In my experience, upgrades are 99% trivial, and 1% cause disastrous headaches and downtime. If I were the ICEBlock author, I would put this on a list of things to look into, and ensure that it was tested thoroughly if I did decide to upgrade. It’s not as simple as running “sudo apt upgrade”.
And I imagine that given the scale of the product, the author has incredible demands on his time, and can’t just drop everything because somebody (who has already shown themselves to be communicating rather negatively) imposes an arbitrary short deadline.
Now maybe it turns out that I’m unaware that ICEBlock is a huge net negative for the world, which is why this post has so many upvotes. But just interpreting the facts as they’re presented in the article, and substituting ICEBlock for TodoApp… I don’t see how the developer has acted unreasonably.
Post script: I followed up and read the original blog post (https://micahflee.com/unfortunately-the-iceblock-app-is-acti...), which I largely agree with. I still think Micah has mishandled communicating the vulnerability.
My employer rarely has that level of urgency, let alone a side project that is probably revenue negative!
This feels like a hit piece...
Critically, it's not even clear that this is a vulnerability report. Yes the version is out dated, and yes there are known CVEs, but is the server actually vulnerable?
The CVE referenced has the key phrase: "... whose response headers are malicious or exploitable". This does not appear to be a CVE that would impact every installation. You need to find a way to control the response headers, meaning you need to chain another vulnerability.
Without verifying that the server is vulnerable this isn't a vulnerability report. It's a suggestion to install updates. Paired with the poor delivery, it seems reasonable for the author to get blocked and ignored.
danielvf•4h ago
I've been burned in the long past when trying to be helpful to an activist. The accuracy of information provided was never a consideration.
gwbas1c•3h ago
Depends on context. When it's a knowledgeable user reporting the issue, you're right.
What I mostly encounter are for profit "security researchers" who try to profit on fear and/or misunderstanding.
pseudo0•2h ago