âAnyone stupid enough to download Yo deserves the security threat it representsâ
That sounds like victim blaming. Why should someone âdeserveâ a security threat for downloading a silly commercial app?
I can see making fun of the investors in such an app given that it pretty much does nothing, but saying people deserve security threats for an app that whoâs concept isnât inherently insecure strikes an off chord with me.
Yo.
This just in⌠hackers are hacking.
Yo ho ho.
This proves it: weâre running out of useful things for the internet to do. Everything has been invented. There is no more.
Oh yea? You think so? Then show me where the internet has any adorabable cats, I challenge you!
How on earth is there room for a remotely exploitable vulnerability, in an app that sends text messages consisting entirely of the word âyoâ?
Who has the chutzpah to create an app that does this, and then manages to somehow sell people on the idea and get a million dollars in funding? Every time I worry about how to start up a business and make it work, I look at stuff like this and wonder, who not only thinks this crap up but actually turns it into a business? In other words âWhy didnât I invent the Billy Bass?â âWhy didnât I program the Yo app?â âWhy did I see the NEED for pet rocks?â
Agreed. Also, the Yo app makes me think: Kids. Lawn. Get off.
What are they even going to do with a million dollars? Upgrade it to also say âsup?â
I know why for me. Itâs because when I see things like this I realize I could never come up with that idea because itâs Fân stupid. I couldnât seriously sit down and make an app like this and then try and actually market it. For fun and humor sure alright maybe throw an ad banner in or something, but actual investorsâŚ
The paid version gets you the additional dialog of âHow u doinâ?â
or
something involving a highly inappropriate selfieâŚcause thatâs where I think the mentality of people using Yo might reside.
Dunno. Think our minds must be too highly trained.
It seems like Yo app users are now a mobile botnet. Itâs no wonder this app got a million dollar investment.
Maybe for bad news it could say âOyâ
Itâs especially the case because this isnât a situation where stupidity and insecurity are obviously related:
If you receive an email from a bank you donât have an account with, rife with typos, determining that somebody is probably lying to you is a critical thinking exercise.
The fact that this is the worldâs stupidest messaging application, though, tells you essentially nothing about whether it is wildly insecure, rock solid, or average. Short of actually penetration testing it yourself before installing (which would probably constitute a number of CFAA violations, in addition to requiring some skill in the area), you really donât have much to go on.
As much as seeing âSilicon valleyâ reduced to a VC circle-jerk over âsocialâ shit of arbitrary stupidity sometimes makes me want to scourge the whole place with nuclear fire and give the cockroaches a shot at making better use of semiconductors, I can only really assail the taste, rather than the security practices, of somebody who would download this, and I probably skew pretty far in the direction of âembittered paranoiacâ by market standards.
Fifteen years ago the same sort of investor was lining up to back a company that sold pet food on-line below cost. Itâs technology â it isnât supposed to make sense, so long as a successful IPO looks likely,
Hacked or not, I think people are missing the truly awe-inspiring technological accomplishment that these guys have achieved. In my extensive tests, I have been unable to find a single person who can differentiate between a Ukranian-bot-Yo and a human-initiated Yo.
In other words, the Yo engine is the first AI to pass the Turing Test without doubt or question. Skynet? Vâger? Hal? They are as children next to Lord Yo!
Arguably, this is even weirder: pets.com gambled, and lost rather dramatically, on being able to survive the initial bleeding stage in order to build a commanding presence, economies of scale, and so on; but they were taking basically the same bet as Amazon, who didnât lose (and now sells basically anything you can legally put in the mail, including some rather low value per unit weight items, and even perishables in some markets).
With âYoâ, you have a special-purpose app, usable only to contact other people who also have the special-purpose app, that performs a trivial subset of features that (since this runs on phones) 100% of their âcustomersâ can already access in some other way: SMS, Google chat/XMPP, Whatsapp, whatever.
Investing in this is like investing in pets.com in the hypothetical alternate universe where pets.com has committed to only selling a single brand and flavor of canned cat food; and where all internet users already have access to âConsumer Good Transfer Protocol", âGeneric Comestible Transport Serviceâ, and "Companion Animal Logistics Frameworkâ either for free or at negligible marginal cost.
More like it is one of the first to make humans fail the Turing Test en masse.
