They tried hard to discrete me. My initial report had an error, that is I didn't know that Bluetooth on Android needs ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION permission. A person pointed this out in a comment -- he posted and rewrote it three times. I said thank you and thought that's that, but then he and a bunch of new people commented that since I made that basic mistake I'm immature and inexperienced, therefore the rest of my findings have no merit.
Someone then posted a super long comment, raising a lot of questions about my credibility and intention. The interesting thing is they claimed that they're a student, haven't installed the app, have no intention to do so, but care a lot about privacy. Essentially they want to show that they're merely an underdog bystander standing up against my wrongdoings. I thought this is a very subtle psychological trick, aiming to amplify their attacks.
Other attacks are more direct. For example, a person pointed out that since I don't have many followers on Twitter, I'm not a good engineer. They said I didn't really contribute anything to my public research, but I just took credit from my coauthors. That I am only cleaning toilet at Google, there's nothing proud about that.
After I posted a rebuttal to the developers' rebuttal, a guy [2] dropped this one-line comment:
>cái vụ này bắt đầu thấy nhảm rồi. Lập luận của anh Thái cũng không còn chặt chẽ như trước nữa.
Which translates to "This is getting nonsense. Thai's argument is not as strict as before".
The title of the guy's blog [3] is, I kid you not, "There's always only one truth: Communist Party of Vietnam.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_brigades
I took that intent from the article, but 'professionals' aren't always as kind in their reading of things like that.
Interesting article.
The growth rate is 2x-3x every day, faster than COVID-19.
