Jane Manchun Wong: App researcher who unlocks new features before they launch
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It has been delightful to watch different approaches companies take to enrich, optimize and harden their web and mobile apps.
For example, Facebook has been dogfooding a new approach to improve the overhead in their mobile apps since last year. I speculate (or hope) they will announce it during F8 2019 in coming days.
Ps. Nice work!
For now, I do tweet about it whenever I post something new on my blog
Congratulations, fellow traveller.
It's a Hackathon-themed Facebook group:
Can anyone with a good understanding tell me if that really qualifies as insider trading or market manipulation? As I understand it, she reverse engineers a publicly available app, something that anyone with the technical know-how could do. So even if she bought stocks before releasing this information, anyone could have done the same and learned the information the same way.
I would be really surprised if big investment firms aren’t already doing that (but just don’t release this information publicly). I don’t see how this is any different from collecting other public information and placing bets based on that information. (e.g. reading import lists from container ships and estimate the production volume from a company before they announce it).
Otherwise, Jane’s efforts seem to be pretty cool and I am honestly surprised that more people aren’t doing it. I can’t wait to get read her blog later!
That article suggests that there is a consensus that high tech surveillance doesn't count as inside information, and I can't see why Jane's reverse engineering would be different. There's also an argument that she is publicizing the material, so depending on the order of operations maybe it is public?
A separate question is what kind of trouble you might be able to get into with specific companies due to license agreements. Would love legal take on any of above as well.
> A separate question is what kind of trouble you might be able to get into with specific companies due to license agreements. Would love legal take on any of above as well.
I believe you are allowed to reverse engineer software you own in most countries despite what the TOS says. But they might ban you from their platform which doesn’t stop reverse engineering because Apple/Google is distributing the software.
Unless Ms. Wong was cracking into companies and stealing pre-release versions of their apps, or had received them on promise of confidentiality, it's hard to see how this would reasonably class as insider trading. As to the market manipulation angle, even if she were trading on the information she uncovered, would this be materially different to short sellers publishing their research on a company to push the stock down?
IANAL
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
Jane, since you're on: I'm curious how you feel about the red-team/blue-team dynamics of what you're doing. If companies get better at hiding tests and under-development features, is that a Good Thing? Or, does reverse engineering demonstrate that they should be more transparent about dev in the first place? Or, is the frontier of reverse-engineering / hiding stuff itself something productive?
Often times, this kind of scoops could be beneficial to companies. Product teams at companies could look at public opinions and take that into the consideration of product decision. It functions similarly to "focus groups" or "soft launch", except it's free. According to my profile on CNN, a Twitter spokesperson mentioned [0]:
> the platform wants its users to be part of the process, and these types of discoveries help it learn
That's not to say companies encourage users to reverse engineer their apps. However, if they make it completely impossible to find any unreleased features whatsoever, it will kill off this free channel of unofficially gathering public opinions (or hype) before launch.
It is understandable there are competitors out there in reality. Getting better at hiding tests and under-development features could help preventing the competitors from knowing the company's upcoming strategies.
To hide or to not hide, they both have pros and cons. It really comes down to how companies balance their priorities. If their priority is to hide everything until launch, even if it means getting rid of the free QA and focus groups, go for it.
I personally hope companies will choose the transparent route rather than being a sealed black box. I believe users deserve to know what is changed in the apps installed on their own phones. Being more specific than the vague "bug fixes and improvements" will provide a sense of assurance to users.
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/22/tech/jane-wong-app-features/i...
If they were fabricated screenshots or leaked press releases then they might have a case. But if these companies really didnt want these features to be leaked, then they should have done a better job of securing them. Is it really that hard? It wasnt like this was a rogue employee!
I think there are better ways to bring food to the table than this, such as getting a job as SWE, or donations.
I never earned any money from this hobby and have no plans to change it
Except for the bug bounties you've received, presumably. Unless you consider those a separate part of what you do. All great work in any case!
I understand the purpose is to enable it programmatically, but what's the problem with simply showing user "Please update, there's a new feature"?