Fazil Khandwani

Fazil works through an app listing the way a careful shopper works through the small print on a packet, and always in the same order: publisher, last updated, permissions and declared data handling, description. Install count last, if at all, on the grounds that it is the field most people look at first and the one that answers no question anybody actually has.

He wrote this site's rule about files, and he is stubborn about its wording. A file that cannot be compared against a publisher record is unverifiable, not dangerous. The distinction is not politeness. "Unverifiable" is a claim about the evidence available to a reader, it is true today, and it can be confirmed in a minute. "Dangerous" is a claim about the file that nobody writing it has tested — and when somebody installs it anyway and nothing visibly happens, they file the warning under noise and ignore the next one.

The second half of his job is the part that is easy to skip: noticing when the thing that was supposed to do the comparing has gone. On this name it has, which is why his pages spend more time on what a listing would have told you than on any particular file.

He does not scan files, publish hashes or quote version numbers, because doing any of that would mean downloading something and nobody here has. The outside is where he stays, and his pages say so.

His other habit is dating everything. A store card is a snapshot: a publisher can change, a date can slide, a listing can vanish between one reading and the next. A remembered card is not evidence about today.

He owns the download entry and reading a store card.