asgaard

Uphold, Brave's BAT token, and fake reviews

Fri, 06 Aug 21 14:10:40 +0000

Uphold, Brave and BAT

If you're not aware, Brave is a desktop and mobile browser. It's very much like Chrome, except that it has an in-built ad-blocker. If you're super into privacy, Firefox and extensions like uBlock are your best bet, but I quite like Brave for mobile because I find Chromium based browsers a lot smoother on Android.

One of Brave's features is Brave Rewards, which grants you rewards for turning on its own notification based adverts. The reward it gives you are in the form of its Basic Attention Token (BAT), which is a cryptocurrency. In theory, once you've accumulated some BAT, you can exchange it into actual money (or another cryptocurrency).

Sounds good? Well, the devil is in the details. In reality, this doesn't work quite as well as it could. Brave forces you to use a service called Uphold, which is a cryptocurrency exchange.

Crypto exchanges have had a lot of bad press in recent years due to instances of incompetence and fraud leading to consumers losing money. With the crypto industry lagging behind traditional banking in terms of regulation and consumer protection, when using an exchange it's extremely important you trust both their ethics and their competence.

Uphold

So, in evaluating how useful Brave's BAT is, the key question is: do you trust Uphold?

My answer: No, I do not.

Uphold is very quick to close and accounts, sending a stock message:

We’re very sorry to tell you that we can no longer offer you an account. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions as new information becomes available. Our automated systems aren’t perfect and, if you feel that we’ve made a mistake, please contact support.

Personally, I would not trust an organisation with my money which uses "automated systems" that "aren't perfect" to freeze the assets of its customers, without warning or explanation.

These are not isolated instances. A brief look at the Brave community forum reveals many people whose accounts have been closed:

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-refuses-to-give-me-an-account/261657

https://community.brave.com/t/alternative-to-uphold/235216

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-declined-my-verification-request/40086

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-closed-my-creator-account/51200

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-blocked-my-account/63805

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-blocking-accounts-of-brave-users/239271

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-is-blocking-the-accounts-now-where-will-we-receive-payments-enable-binance/239037

https://community.brave.com/t/alternative-ways-to-collect-rewards/241012/2

It seems to be a real risk that you'll either be unable to access your rewards in the first place, or one day you'll be locked out with no warning. Hopefully you won't have an outstanding balance when that happens.

Fake reviews on TrustPilot

Uphold's TrustPilot rating is currently about 2.6 out of 5. That's not great, but it's also not particularly good.

However, many of the recent positive reviews are a little bit suspicious.

On the most recent page there are 20 reviews. 17 are 5 star (the other three are scathing one star reviews - including mine, the first shown in the main page screenshot).

Out of those 17, 15 have written reviews for other companies too. What's strange is the names of those other companies. Those 15 reviews have written reviews for: EduHelpersArena, EduhelpersLeague, EducatorsLodge, EduHelpersWing, or EssaysPlot.

Links to screenshots: Main page, reviews: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14.

It's an incredible coincidence that Uphold's positive reviewers share such an interest in a narrow set of education services! Or is it more likely that Uphold are dealing with a company offering fake reviews, who re-use accounts between customers? Apparently, not even a particularly good review service!

Fake reviews are illegal in the UK under the Fraud Act 2006, Section 2 - Fraud by false representation.

This is not a good look for a financial services company hoping to gain consumer trust.

I am surprised and a bit disappointed that Brave hasn't been more selective in its choice of business partnerships. Unfortunately, this reflects on them as well as Uphold.

Update: 2021-08-14. I received an email from TrustPilot saying that Uphold had flagged my review as potentially "not genuine". My review quotes the generic support message I received, so this appears to me to be Uphold acting in bad faith to suppress a critical review.

TrustPilot invited me to reply with proof that I'd had dealings with Uphold, so I did. I also questioned a new batch of dubious reviews on the Uphold page. My email is as follows, and I'll update this with TrustPilot's response should I receive one.

from: Mark
to: Trustpilot Content Integrity
date: 14 Aug 2021, 11:20
subject: Re: About your review of uphold.com on Trustpilot - Ticket #10309860
Dear Trustpilot,

Please find attached two screenshots showing my contact with Uphold, and the response they gave which I referenced in my review.

Furthermore, I would like to note that many of the recent 5-star reviews on Uphold's Trustpilot page do not appear to be genuine.

The following users have recently left a 5-star review for both Uphold and "smartwareco.com.au", which is an extremely unlikely coincidence if these are genuine users.

https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6018f58eed25de001a0f4270
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/5fe1dd72514907001959743a
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/603c8931d7c49c0019ae813f
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/61160eaa82f804001217d5ac
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/61164bacc82d920012514536
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/603739cae3e1a6001fefeed4
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6116080f5ebf83001211d2e7
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/5fe1cfef80c5a900198ae502
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6115f367935a640012d84aa2
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6115ef655ebf83001211cc01

These comprise the majority of 5-star reviews currently shown on Uphold's page.

I hope that you will treat these with the same scepticism that you have treated mine, as fraudulent reviews erode trust in your platform.

The Godfather: Family Dynasty review: An offer I can refuse

Thu, 11 Feb 21 09:22:17 +0000

A long time ago I used to play an ancient browser game called Travian. Travian was released in around 2004 and still exists to this day, so you can go and check it out if you want, but I'd really recommend you don't because it's just not a good experience. I imagine it's dated and feels clunky now, but really my issue is that it's just not fun.

It's a persistent world where players grow and build villages by farming resources and ransacking each other. I didn't play it for long, because within a few weeks I realised that I was running my life around it. It's always there, even when you're not, so unless you're OK with losing days or weeks of progress because someone attacked you when you were offline and unprepared, you have to run your whole life around it. Was it fun? No, it really wasn't. It was addictive. Big difference.

So when the Play Store's adverts thrust The Godfather: Family Dynasty in my face, I had mixed feelings. I had some free time, I quite liked the Godfather, it said it was free... but as I got a bit further into it (you don't unlock the 'world' to begin with) - wait, doesn't this look a lot like Travian?

After playing The Godfather: Family Dynasty for a few weeks and becoming interested enough to look at other games in the Play Store, it seems that Travian was the prototype of what I'd called predatory mobile games.

The Godfather: Family Dynasty is pay to win. Well, at least, it's pay to beat other players. The core gameplay loop of TG:FD is that you gather resources (which may involve attacking other players, or being attacked), then use those resources to upgrade buildings and train troops. Every level of upgrade takes longer than before. Before long you're looking at upgrades that take several days to complete. The pay-to-win aspect comes in by allowing you to buy speed-up items.

Calling it to pay to win is slightly misleading though. You pay to speed up tasks by a constant amount. But those tasks take an ever increasing amount of time to complete. The mathematics of this doesn't make it seem appealing.

The only person winning here is the person taking the player's money. In fact, on the server I played on, there was another player complaining that he'd put thousands of pounds into another server only for it to die off as players became bored and the server emptied. He considered it wasted money as it didn't transfer to the new server. That's quite an extraordinary inflationary feedback loop: As you pay more to become stronger than other players, other players will become disheartened and leave, leaving you with no one to play with, making your money wasted.

Ignoring the monetisation aspect, the other problem with these games is that they demand your attention on their own schedule. You can't think "I have a spare half hour, I'll boot up the game" because you there might be nothing in the game for you to do. Conversely, when something is happening in the game, you need to react to it in real time, so you may have to give your attention when it's not convenient for you. Feeling that you have to always be aware of it makes the game addictive, even though it's actually quite boring because there's often nothing to do.

The Godfather branding is a very superficial layer. Occasionally the likeness of one of the characters appears on your screen, but that's about the only connection to the Godfather it has. The game itself is mostly focused on building a lot of troops and throwing them at other people, which has no obvious connection to The Godfather at all. The Godfather is a film about family and business with crime sprinkled in liberally. This is a game about building armies. The game is developed by a Chinese developer and if you told me that nobody developing the game had ever heard of the film before being involved with the game, I'd believe you. The English is also quite dubious.

I'm surprised that Paramount Studios have allowed The Godfather's brand to be associated something that comes across as a bit cheap. At the time of writing, The Godfather film is almost 50 years old. It's a classic film that has stood the test of time and is still regarded as a world class piece of art. TG:FD is not a world class piece of art. It is hard to overstate just how far TG:FD is from being a world class piece of art.

But then it seems par the course - Pirates of the Caribbean has a very similar looking app... actually, hang on, that UI looks very familiar. And what's this, Game Of War also looks remarkably familiar...

Overall I think this is just the cheap world of mobile games. There are a huge number of games that are all basically the same, but adapted in relatively minor ways to fit different franchises or art styles. The Godfather: Family Dynasty is just one among many of a set of clones of basically the same game. The only way it stands out is by attaching itself to a hugely successful movie franchise, but then fails in-game to connect to what made the movies interesting.

Are app store reviews reliable?

Fri, 29 Jan 21 11:05:57 +0000

Are app store reviews reliable? Well, anyone who knows anything about app store reviews, or online reviews in general, knows the answer is no. App reviews are gamed by developers and the overall rating generally corresponds to how much the developer games the system rather than anything useful.

But that's not really what prompted me to write this.

There is an internet drama being played out between Reddit's WallStreetBets (WSB) and some hedge funds. WSB has pumped up the price of Gamestop stock, which has led to various hedge funds losing a huge amount of money. This should be fine - the hedge funds were gambling on something that didn't happen, and they knew the risks.

However, in response to this, some platforms have restricted the trading of Gamestop stocks. This infuriated a lot of people who were investing in Gamestop stocks, as the platforms' behaviour influenced the price of the stock.

Predictably, a lot of people started leaving one-star reviews on the Play Store, and, for example, Robinhood's rating plunged from around 4.2 to 1 star.

Unpredictably, Google has since removed hundreds of thousands of one star reviews from Robinhood, restoring their original rating of 4.2. Google has questions to answer about why they're deleting reviews that voice legitimate user complaints.

Personally I think it's time we dumped store ratings. They're artificial and unhelpful at the best of times, and if app stores are going to artificially manipulate them then they're completely without use.

The Amazon App Store is not great

Sun, 03 Jan 21 18:45:58 +0000

Today, I was trying to get Wellburrito onto the Amazon App Store.

I didn't expect it to pass validation first time because it has dependencies on a few Google services that I wasn't sure existed on Amazon devices. I expected it to fail with a message saying this, and then we'd have to discuss whether or not to launch a limited version of it with those dependencies removed.

That didn't happen.

What actually happened was that it failed validation with the following message:

Your app submission does not meet one or more of our acceptance criteria for some or all targeted devices. Failure reason(s) are listed below: We are unable to test your app as it does not function as intended. The app exits/ force closes/ freezes/ displays an error message after being launched. Please fix the issue and re-submit the app.

This is a resoundingly unhelpful message. We're not going to randomly change our code and hope it passes validation. Why doesn't Amazon include the logcat output so we can see what the crash actually is?

As such, Wellburrito will not be available through Amazon for the foreseeable future.

Wellburrito

Fri, 01 Jan 21 19:57:44 +0000

I'm very pleased that we have released the first public version of Wellburrito.

Wellburrito is more than just a mood tracking app, it's a full wellbeing app focusing on mood and custom metric tracking as well as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) exercises.

Technically, Wellburrito is developed using the Ionic framework. Data is intentionally stored purely locally on the device, i.e. without a server, for the user's privacy. For this we use an SQLite database, which is optionally backed up to Google Drive on a regular schedule. Android does actually take care of restoring the database on app reinstallation through Google Play, as well, if the user has it enabled, via Android's auto-backup feature.

On the mid to long term roadmap is reducing dependency on things beyond our control that aren't really of the quality or flexibility we'd like. For example, we'd like to expand the reminders system such that users can interact directly with reminders. When a medication reminder comes up, we'd like to be able to press a little "Yes, I've taken it" button. When the mood journal reminder comes up, it'd be good if the user could select a mood within the reminder. Those things are currently not possible because the reminders library we're using doesn't support it. Unfortunately, getting the control we need means writing our own library.

Similarly, we'd like charts to better fit with the look and feel and branding of the app, but we've pushed the current charting solution to its boundaries.

There are a few little things like this which seem like relatively small features but require a large amount of work. We've pushed these back to a future version for the moment, in favour of getting something functional in front of users.

In terms of features, we'd also like to implement much deeper analysis. Currently we have superficial analysis and reporting of trends and correlations, but there is a lot more we could do with this. Again, this is a 'version 2' feature.

You can read more about the Wellburrito wellbeing, mood tracking and mindfulness app on the official page.

You can download the Wellburrito wellbeing app on Google Play.

Ionic Native

Fri, 01 Jan 21 10:21:58 +0000

Ionic is a framework for developing mobile apps. I've completed a few successful projects using Ionic. I like Ionic. I think that as far as cross platform mobile development goes, Ionic is pretty good.

Ionic was built on Cordova, and has been gradually moving away from it with Capacitor. I like Capacitor better than Cordova. I think they've done a really good job.

Ionic Native is a set of Cordova plugins that they've provided a wrapper for. If you look at the list, it looks very impressive. If you try to use any of them, though, it's a toss up as to whether you end up with something production standard. Some of the plugins there shouldn't be on the list because they're just broken.

The Local Notification plugin is a good example of this. Currently, it's pointing at the underlying Cordova plugin version 0.9.0-beta2. At the time of writing, this is around three years old. The most recent version is 15 months old. So not only is the plugin not actively maintained, we're also out of date even by the plugin's standards.

Unfortunately it doesn't work very well on modern Android operating systems. Trying to schedule a repeating notification causes the plugin to go into an infinite loop until the OS steps in and kills it, so the workaround is to set a notification with a large 'count'. This causes very slow interaction with the notification in future, presumably because the operating system is dealing with a notification instance per count. This is something you can work around by scheduling, say, 100 days in advance and making sure your app reschedules when you're getting close to the end of the 100 days. You shouldn't have to do this, but it's an option.

However, there's a much more serious problem in that the plugin can't schedule notifications that persist past the device rebooting. There are a few use cases where this may be acceptable, but for a general notification system, this is a deal-breaking limitation that you don't find out about until testing (and physically testing notifications is tedious and error prone enough already).

Then there's the in app purchases plugin. The IAP plugin is bizarre. When dealing with subscriptions, there is no way of simply querying whether the user owns a subscription, because the 'owned' field isn't reliable. When the plugin starts up, a subscription goes through a variety of states, but always starts with owned = false. Maybe it reaches owned = true, maybe it doesn't. The point is that owned = false is never a useful piece of information because there's no guarantee it's correct. This means that there is no completely reliable way of determining whether a user's subscription has expired. You have to look at the subscription billing period and be aware of when it may have expired, and if you go a certain length of time with successful communication with the plugin but without seeing owned = true you then assume that it must have expired. This is absurd, and I would be extremely surprised if the underlying billing library exposes subscription information in this way.

Ionic should not be providing wrappers (and exposure) for these plugins unless they meet a certain standard. It's a waste of developers' time to attempt to use sub-standard plugins and will fuel a perception that it's difficult to achieve production quality software using Ionic.

Update: Another one - Ionic Native Audio doesn't work with Capacitor because it hard codes audio assets as existing within the www/ directory. In Capacitor, this directory has been named public/ so the plugin can't find any of your audio assets. Again, why is this being advertised by Ionic, with Capacitor instructions?

The (virtual) Great North Run

Sat, 19 Sep 20 14:35:58 +0000

I did the Virtual Great North Run last week, which is the first virtual race I've done, and I have to say that it was a pretty underwhelming experience.

The Great Run Company hyped it quite a lot by promising an app that would deliver some kind of 'experience', but it didn't work properly and it ended up being 'just' a long run.

The app they chose is called viRACE, which wasn't doesn't look like it was developed specifically for the Great Run company.

I used to work for a company that developed low budget apps, which it did by offshoring development (mostly). Every so often I'd get called into my boss's office, where he'd ask me to rescue the latest disastrous project and I'd be shown an app that, generally, would look abysmal. When I opened up viRACE, I had (unwelcome) flashbacks to working for this company. It just looks like an app that won't work properly. Beauty is skin deep, but software often looks exactly as well as it works because people who do a good job tend to make their work look at least presentable.

viRACE disappointed in every way. Standing on the (virtual) start line at 9:30, viRACE wasn't connecting so I had to forget the app and just run. Fortunately I have a Garmin watch so (unofficially) recording my run was not an issue, but viRACE was the official means of actually recording it. There was no instructions from the Great Run Company explaining what to do in the event that viRACE didn't work, so that was a pretty bad experience.

As it turned out, though, viRACE did connect, after about 1.5km. The first clue I had to this was that every so often my music (from my phone) would pause. I learnt at about the 10km mark that it was attempting to play audio, as it then informed me I'd run 5 miles. Well I was actually part way through the 7th, but never mind... This would happen every so often - sometimes it would manage to play a sound clip, other times my music would just pause.

Eventually I finished and stopped my Garmin and had a look at the app, which told me I still had a few km to go. I ended up running almost 23km in total so that I would officially finish.

Overall I found the experience extremely poor, and the Great Run Company haven't issued any statements or apologies about it or indicated that they will learn from it. Unfortunately, this is not surprising to me as the Great Run Company have previously disappointed. The last non-virtual Great Run event I took part in was the 2019 Birmingham Half Marathon, which they announced at the last minute was a mile short (though it was around 3-4km short according to my Garmin).

Giffgaff SMS scam - SIM swap

Wed, 24 Jun 20 10:38:31 +0000

There is an SMS scam going around targeting Giffgaff customers, which sends an SMS reading:

The request to swap your number to your new giffgaff SIM is pending. If that wasn't you, log in immediately. [URL removed]

If you go to the site, it looks like a giffgaff site and asks you to log in. It actually accepts any username and password, and then presents you with a screen asking you to confirm your personal details, including your bank account number.

This is a scam and has nothing to do with giffgaff. You should ignore the text message.[...]

Pokémon GO is discontinuing support for 32 bit Android devices

Sat, 13 Jun 20 11:20:10 +0000

Update: Niantic has backed away from this and announced that they are deferring this decision after all.

Niantic, the company behind Pokémon GO, announced recently that Pokemon GO will no longer work on 32 bit Android devices from August. You'd be forgiven for having missed this, as although it's on the official blog, it doesn't show in the in-game news.

Whilst the announcement makes it sound like only older devices will be affected, this is not the case. Many newer Android phones ship with 64 bit hardware, but a 32 bit operating system, in which case they are, for all practical purposes, 32 bit devices and are restricted to running 32 bit apps.

Unless a device has more than 4GB of RAM, there's not any great advantage to using a 64 bit OS, so a lot of budget phones come with a 32 bit operating system. For example, a large number of devices in the Motorola G range and the Samsung A and J ranges have only a 32 bit OS, even some of those released in the last 12 months. The Silph Road community on Reddit has started to assemble a list of modern devices that will be affected by this change.

Unfortunately, it's not clear that Niantic has understood the distinction between the architecture of the CPU and the architecture of the operating system. The devices in their list of examples all have 32 bit CPUs. It is very possible that they have made this decision based on data collected on hardware, and have not looked at operating system architecture data. I suspect the fact they've given this quite a low-profile announcement means they have estimated that this will not affect many people, and I also suspect that it will actually affect a large number of people. This seems like the kind of announcement that should be made 12 months in advance, not 6 weeks.

For those who will be affected by this, I recommend waiting until closer to August before replacing your device. Niantic may have made a mistake and may yet back down.

It's also worth noting that it's actually quite difficult to determine if you're buying a 32 bit or 64 bit device, as a lot of manufacturers don't publish this information. If you do need to replace your device, choose carefully.

Dropbox's marketing could use a bit of work

Wed, 24 May 17 19:03:04 +0000

I use Dropbox and I like Dropbox. One of my biggest use cases for it is that I have it syncing photos from my phone to my PC. I find this very convenient. I take a photo and a few seconds later the notification of a new file pops up on my PC. Truly, I am living in the future.

I get 2GB of space with my free Dropbox account and that's not enough to simply take photos and forget about them forever. Every so often, I move them out of Dropbox onto a different directory on my hard disk to free up about 1.8GB of that space.

After I do this, I get an email from Dropbox telling me they've noticed I deleted a lot of files, but that I can restore them for the next 30 days. The next day I get an email asking me to upgrade to Dropbox Plus, presumably because they've correctly noticed I am working around the space limitations.

Here's the thing: I like Dropbox and I wish I had more space, but paying £8/month for 1TB is ridiculous on several levels. Firstly, I have no use for 1TB of space. If I'm paying I don't want the impression that I'm wasting 99% of my money, and that is a very literal 99%: I don't really want or need more than 10GB. Drop it down to 80p a month for 10GB and I'd be more interested.

Secondly, if I want to use Dropbox as long term storage then I don't want to have to rent it monthly because there's the implication that when I stop paying it all disappears, which is hardly what you want from long term storage. There should be an option to pay for two or three years up front so you know the price or other terms aren't going to change over that time.

In conclusion, I'm also syncing to Google Drive which gives me 15GB of space (shared with email).