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stealing posts

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Odds and ends, Developer, iPhone, App Store, Jailbreak/pwnage

iCombat's stats on app pirates


Miguel Sanchez-Grice, creator of the iCombat app (a remake of the old Atari game), sent us these stats on piracy of his app after writing a blog post about the same thing, and I find them fascinating. Instead of building DRM into his app, he just detected if the player was using a copy that wasn't from the App Store, and then forwarded them onto a web page that he could track. It seems like he equates unique visitors to his Pinch Media site as users (though he doesn't go into detail about exactly where those "Pinch Media New Uniques" numbers come from), and then subtracts legit app sales from those numbers to get the number of pirates. And while he says the numbers are lower than he expected, they seem pretty high to me: there is a substantial number of people out there using cracked apps.

Continue readingiCombat's stats on app pirates

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, iTS, Odds and ends, iTunes, Apple, App Store

iTunes gift cards cracked

This seems like bad news for Apple, to say the least. A few Chinese websites are now selling $200 gift certficates to iTunes for less than a few bucks, which means that it's likely hackers have figured out the algorithm to determine gift codes on Apple's music store. As with most online codes, iTunes gift certificate numbers are generated by a formula somewhere -- figure out the formula, and you can generate your own codes (though it's of course tough to do and highly illegal).

The good news is that this might be an easy fix for Apple: they'll just have to re-figure the formula. The tougher thing to do will be to determine which of the old codes to honor -- they'll want to make sure to approve all of the cards on the shelves at Best Buy right now, while still trying to catch all of the illegal codes generated by hackers.

But then again, we're talking about a digital store that's already making cash hand over fist. Maybe even if one hacker on a shady website has figured out how to generate iTunes codes, Apple isn't too concerned about losing a few thousand dollars when they're still selling millions of dollars worth of music and content legitimately.

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