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Dictionary app auto-posts piracy accusations on users’ Twitter accounts
- philip1209 14y agoCould this be considered libel?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- polymatter 14y agonot in the UK. Over here it can still be libel even if true(!)
- xutopia 14y agoOr offensive and then we can put you in prison just because.
- yock 14y agoMy gut reaction is to temper my response to this because I tend to overreact to injustice, but this is just unforgivable.
- Karunamon 14y agoBooby trapped software. Very clever, except for when it blows up in your face. At least they only posted to twitter instead of [1] something a lot worse (think file deletion, etc). Generally a bad idea, if you're of the leet warez d00d type, to give any illicitly acquired app your credentials to anything important, at least until you've verified that it's safe. The armchair lawyer in me wonders if someone could get a libel/defamation suit going because of this. The average user wouldn't probably have much to go on, but the head of a company perhaps.. yikes. [1]: http://www.geocities.ws/johnboy_tutorials/bt.html http://www.geocities.ws/johnboy_tutorials/bt.html why yes that *is* a geocities address!
- yock 14y agoSomething we see discussed on occasion is a call for app developers to explain in detail why they request certain permissions. If this developer were required to explain (and the user required to acknowledge) the requested permission, it may have prevented the whole episode.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoNo it wouldn't have. The app required permission, or he couldn't use the thing he paid $50 for. The is a (stunning) app store review failure. A dictionary app that requires permission to post to your twitter should be rejected, period.
- mistercow 14y agoYeah, if they're going to put honest developers through bullshit and make them delay releases to change their apps according to the arbitrary whims of the reviewers, you'd think they could at least catch something like this.
- btilly 14y agoNot that surprising a failure to me. You'd only see the behavior on a phone that tripped their check for piracy. As long as the Apple reviewer didn't use such a phone, no obnoxious behavior. I am sure that Apple has a standard checklist, and am not surprised that this is not on it.
- praptak 14y ago> The armchair lawyer in me wonders if someone could get a libel/defamation suit going because of this. As a professional certified internet laywer I'd also add impersonation.
- __david__ 14y agoThat seems a difficult route given that the user had to explicitly give twitter posting access permission to the app in question...
- whamill 14y agoSloppy effort on behalf of the developers. Andreas (author of the blog post) was right to deny it permission to use his Twitter account the first few times but gave in eventually because of the nagging. If there was a way to see expanded permissions before allowing a program to update perhaps he would have not updated at all?
- drivebyacct2 14y ago>If there was a way to see expanded permissions before allowing a program to update perhaps he would have not updated at all? You really can't do that on the App Store?
- hospadam 14y agoThe fact that the developer would only allow the app to run if the user granted access to their twitter feed would be very annoying to me. This scenario is exactly what Apple tried to help users avoid with Twitter permissions. I understand the developers wishes to stop piracy - but this is the wrong way. Simply checking for Installous is an incredibly lazy hack to check for piracy.
- smirksirlot 14y agoThis is so offensive. I get piracy is an issue, but how did they ever think this would be a legitimate solution? Honestly, just let the quality of your app speak for itself.
- mistercow 14y agoFrom what I understand, piracy on iOS isn't an issue. The only place where it's really significant is China. And there are two points to keep in mind there: 1. Stopping piracy of a single app in China is very unlikely to result in increased sales of that app. 2. There's no Twitter in China.
- smackfu 14y agoWell, what makes something an issue? There is certainly piracy on iOS... people jailbreak their phones and then pass around ipa files on the standard piracy sites. I'd say it is similar to piracy on game consoles. It exists but you need to do something unusual to enable it, so most people don't do it.
- mistercow 14y agoRight. It happens, but that's not the same as being an issue. In terms of a developer efficiently using their time, chasing after the <5% of your users who pirated your app, and who in all likelihood only heard of your app because it was one of the ones they found on a piracy site, is not a good strategy.
- gurkendoktor 14y agoI suspect that piracy works along the line of "product quality" / "ease of pirating a product". $50 apps and most eBooks have it a lot harder than $1 songs, even if their quality relative to their genre is the same.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoThe developers are calling this a "bug." https://twitter.com/keitaigoddess/status/263995697571971072 https://twitter.com/keitaigoddess/status/263995697571971072 https://twitter.com/keitaigoddess/status/263995940602535936 https://twitter.com/keitaigoddess/status/263995940602535936
- CF_HoneyBadger 14y ago"Bug" my arse...someone was trying to prove a point / make a statement and it bit them. Hard. They will have to do some heavy backpedaling for me to believe it was a bug. I'm a developer. Ive created bugs and fixed bugs. This is not a bug. This is a "feature".
- mistercow 14y agoNo, you see, triggering it for a legitimate user was a bug. In other words, they are unrepentant for including this feature in the first place, even though it's totally scummy and possibly illegal even when targeted at someone who really did pirate the software.
- mibbitier 14y agoIt may well have been a "fun thing" they added in there, but never intended to release to the public. The "bug" could well have been that it was enabled in the public release. So, it's a feature, but the bug could have been that it was unintentionally 'enabled'.
- troels 14y agoSo they created a weapon and accidentally fired it at someone? In most jurisdictions, that would still be an offence.
- mistercow 14y agoI love how they apologize for the "inconvenience". Yes, the inconvenience of being impersonated and publicly defamed through your Twitter account.
- trotsky 14y agoim confused about paying $50 for a dictionary app
- adrr 14y agoit is also a twitter client
- Foomandoonian 14y agofavourite
- john78 14y agoThey also sell a 99 cent American Heritage Desk dictionary app. They are a Japanese company that's been making apps and accessories since the Newton. Their website is interesting - http://enfour.com/ http://enfour.com/
- incision 14y agoSame. It's probably a bit much, but I'm going to go ahead and say... It seems somehow fitting that a company which feels entitled to $50 for a dictionary app would also feel entitled to commandeer a supposed pirate's Twitter account for public embarrassment or do something equally smug [1]. 1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4778847 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4778847
- cobralibre 14y agoThe short, glib answer is that if you have to ask why you would want to pay for a dictionary, then you aren't the kind of person who needs to pay for a dictionary. The long answer is that good dictionaries, such as American Heritage Dictionary, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, and the OED itself, are produced by scholars and experts, guided by editorial panels comprised of scholars and experts, require a great deal of work to produce (the first edition of the OED took something like 71 years to complete!), and contain more data (i.e., more words and more definitions per word) and generally higher quality data than free dictionaries. You're probably willing to pay $50 for software that solves your problems, because you probably make software yourself, and you know that it costs money to create software; an analogy can be made here. But if a barebones dictionary works for you, then it works for you, and don't worry about it. So what is a good dictionary? Here's a tentative answer. A good dictionary provides pithy, useful definitions that reflect the words' differing meanings over time and differing contexts. Most good dictionaries also provide style and usage guidelines (e.g., "When should I use 'lie' and when should I use 'lay'?"), and a good dictionary will also provide a word's etymology. Many free dictionary apps use data from WordNet, which is an amazing resource, but its focus is on tagging words with taxonomic properties (sorry, a better phrase isn't coming to me right now) and defining the relationships between those words, all of which is very useful for general linguistics and NLP research. The quality of the definitions fall short, and you should be able to confirm this by comparing just about any WordNet definition to a definition from a good dictionary at your library. I was hoping to find a better example, but to give yourself an idea of the research problems that can be solved with a good dictionary, consider reading this brief student's guide to using the OED: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/oedguide.htm http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/oedguide.htm
- kstenerud 14y agoMost likely, their "piracy detector" was nothing more than checking for "MobileSubstrate" (a library present in all jailbroken phones) under the silly assumption that jailbroken = pirated. Booby trapped software is NEVER a good idea. No matter how clever you think you are, you're not clever enough.
- activepeanut 14y agoWhat do you think of disabling IAPs if IAPCracker or IAPFree is detected?
- hackmiester 14y agoThat sounds good, as long as you don't go on the internet and talk shit about the user if it is detected. Popping a message like this would be good: "Sorry, this section of the app is incompatible with IAPCracker. Please contact support if you have received this message in error."
- idunno246 14y agoThe users will still post on your forum and claim they don't know what iapcracker is. and argue incessantly despite having crash reports that logged it in memory
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- alts 14y agoBut there are better ways of attacking fraudulent IAPs. Perhaps more effort, but certainly fewer false positives. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/VerifyingStoreReceipts/VerifyingStoreReceipts.html http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networ...
- kstenerud 14y agoJailbreaking and installing those hacks is difficult enough that your losses from it are likely to be low. So the question comes down to what your motivations are. Money-wise, it doesn't make much sense to tack on any more anti-piracy measures than there are already. You'd effectively be working for pennies designing and implementing your schemes with the amount of revenue they'd likely generate vs your losses from goodwill in the inevitable anti-piracy screw ups. Personally, I prefer the pragmatic approach to the idealist. It's far less stressful.
- gilgoomesh 14y agoIf you're an iOS app developer... The correct way to check if your app has been pirated requires two steps: 1) You must be running on a jailbroken system. Check this by trying to read from outside the sandbox. 2) Check if your app's signature is invalid. Checking this is fairly involved. Look around for code. If either of these two are false, then you've not been pirated (point (2) will be true when your app is checked by Apple but point (1) will be false). For Mac App Store apps, only point (2) is required. The author of the app in the article has only checked point (1) (and additionally checked an irrelevant point by checking for Installous). Incidentally, the preferred action if you've detected a pirate situation is to exit(173).
- myko 14y agoChecking these things wont get you disapproved from the App Store?
- mikecane 14y agoDoes checking for those things slow down the load time of the app? Wouldn't that punish paid users?
- gilgoomesh 14y agoThe files you're reading are already cached by the OS (to perform the exact same work). The only processing involved is computing a hashes and a small RSA encryption. Less than half a millisecond?
- DHowett 14y agoYou could also use access(), which will not incur any file reading overhead or exchange of encryption keys.
- mikeash 14y agoEven if both are true, the app still may not have been pirated. I wouldn't take any action based on this information beyond perhaps gathering statistics (and keep in mind that those statistics could be way off).
- cobralibre 14y agoIt's distressing to see such colossally poor judgment on the part of Enfour. Besides developing the ODE app from TFA, they also produce the American Heritage Dictionary app, which is one of the better if not the best name-brand dictionary app for iOS. I would like to support this app because I don't care to see the professionally edited dictionary go the way of the encyclopedia, but nonsense like this is hard to pardon.
- cs702 14y agoIt would be obviously wrong and illegal for a stranger to come into your home, secretly inventory all physical items in your possession, and then impersonate you on, say, a global TV broadcast in which you're wrongly accused of stealing things. It should also be obviously wrong and illegal for any app secretly to inventory everything in your phone and then impersonate you on a Twitter broadcast in which you're wrongly accused of pirating things. Evidently, the people who made this dictionary app think it's perfectly legal to do that, and must not see anything wrong with it. Our laws, regulations, and societal norms have a long way to go before they catch up with technology.
- paulgb 14y ago> Our laws, regulations, and societal norms have a long way to go before they catch up with technology. I wouldn't say that what this app is doing is within societal norms. Just like laws, societal norms get broken, which is what happened here. The publisher will suffer consequences (both from Apple and potential customers), as they should.
- jellicle 14y ago> Our laws, regulations, and societal norms have a long way to go before they catch up with technology. Oh, that remains to be proven. Impersonating someone else to have them describe themselves as a criminal is pretty clearly legally actionable, both in a civil and criminal sense. There's every likelihood that the laws and regulations will work just fine. And judging by this post, societal norms are also working just fine to disapprove of the behavior. The guy has come up with a new way to violate laws/social norms, to be sure. But that doesn't actually mean they aren't working. They are flexible enough to adapt to most new situations and this is certainly one covered by them.
- codyromano 14y agoYour analogy should be narrowed according to the facts of this case. Assuming that the author's guesses about the app's behavior are correct, this is a case of software checking for one specific tool — a tool that's strongly associated with piracy. A defendant in the physical world wouldn't necessarily have a reasonable expectation of privacy if there were indications that he or she was engaging in unlawful conduct. So it's unfair to say the app's behavior would be obviously illegal or that it's comparable to a secret inventory of all of someone's physical items. That said, I'm not justifying the hijacking of the author's Twitter. That's not an appropriate remedy by any standard.
- stfu 14y agoSomehow I think obviously questionable ideas like these have a positive impact. They are most likely teaching users a lot more about privacy than all the warnings of us "paranoids" can achieve.
- mikeash 14y agoApple needs to burn these people to the ground as an example to others. Pull their apps, refund their customers, and ban them from all Apple platforms for life. If Apple doesn't severely punish this sort of thing, then just what good is their fancy walled garden?
- antidoh 14y ago"just what good is their fancy walled garden?" They are or have been the most highly valued company in the world. The walled garden is not for our benefit.
- mikeash 14y agoThat is exactly what I was trying to imply. Apple and Apple fans are constantly telling us that the walled garden is four our own good. If Apple doesn't take severe action here, then they'll be all but admitting that our protection has nothing to do with it.
- biot 14y agoA walled garden may do a perfect job of keeping rabbits from eating crops. Yet despite completely fulfilling its purpose, it still can't prevent vegetables from rotting.
- JonnieCache 14y agoI always thought it was to stop the children playing in the fields.
- gee_totes 14y agoI always thought it was so none of your neighbors, not just rabbits, could get to the crops.
- s8qnze982y 14y agoWell, they've been, illegally, pursuing their own interest exactly as the people using the app without paying. I don't see anything excessive here; I'm not saying that I justify them of course.
- evoxed 14y agoWhat happens if you don't have a twitter account? Are you unable to open the app or does it behave normally?
- DanBC 14y agoThey claim "complete offline use - no internet connection is required" - but that doesn't seem accurate when compared to the article.
- OldSchool 14y agoI'm a fan of privacy so I don't understand the draw of twitter beyond the original purpose of broadcasting a message to a known list of people. Perhaps even 1-way followers if you add in celebrity types as tweet sources. I guess the tipping point is the 'tweet back' feature. At its worst it seems like a narcissistic 'I want to have public conversations with another individual.' If twitter id's were all anonymous I suppose it's no worse than a forum like this except that the content is most likely far more personal and far less technically valuable. I use HN to keep up on the latest technology and to some extent business trends. Why do people like twitter?
- ramchip 14y agoOne example use case I saw recently in my circle of friends: person A tweets "wow, there's a great special on sashimi bowl at the place near the university", person B tweets back "@a hey, I'll be in the area Friday, how about we go for lunch? anyone else interested?", person C (common friend) sees the conversation and tweets "@a @b hey, I'll go too". Finally a group outing is quickly organized. Mostly I see it used for quick conversations, funny remarks, organizing small events, saying when you're going for a trip...
- aidenn0 14y agoAn example: DJB posted something about why crit-bit trees are superior to hashes, I replied asking about cache-issues with crit-bit trees and he responded back with information about how to make crit-bit trees cache aware. That is a very useful public conversation to have; indeed 20 years ago it could have happened on usenet.
- danso 14y agoContact info to register complaints to the company (Enfour) is here: http://www.enfour.com/richard/index.html http://www.enfour.com/richard/index.html
- mnicole 14y agoFor those not reading the comments -- "I would add that this problem seems to be happening with many, if not all of the Enfour dictionary apps, not just the Oxford app that this story is about. And Enfour seems to be attacking customers who post low reviews on their App Store pages. And this has nothing to do with having a jail broken iPad or iPhone. It is happening to everyone." ".. Enfour is attacking people leaving bad reviews in the App Store, but not by triggering their Twitter accounts. Enfour is actually responding to the bad reviews by posting negative comments about the reviewers themselves on the description pages of Enfour’s apps. You can see these when you access the iPad store, but you have to click “more” for them to appear. I don’t think they show up in the iPhone app store." Sounds like a great company all around.
- pooriaazimi 14y agoI don't have this particular app, but I have Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English (5th ed.), also by Enfour, Inc. that I bought last year for, I don't remember, $50 I think (at the time, now they've dropped the price). The latest version displays "I'm a software thief" as a notification, says to run the app in safe mode and then crashes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/longman-dictionary-contemporary/id316133247?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/longman-dictionary-contempor... Oh, and I'm not jailbroken.
- mambodog 14y agoI've got Collins Gem Malay <-> English dictionary, which requests Twitter access, then when denied throws up a dialog saying 'Run in Safe Mode!' and crashes.
- mindslight 14y agoThis is just the kind of thing comes along with the philosophy that the user shouldn't be the ultimate owner and controller of their computer. Why isn't the app given an opaque 'twitter handle', which may be a real account, a no-op, or has a moderated posting ability? And why is the app allowed to view general properties of the system, looking for system software which it deems unfavorable? Because Apple decided that instead of implementing the above security features (and giving their UI designers the task of making such capabilities understandable and non-overwhelming), they would simply only allow "good" apps. Well guess what - "good" doesn't scale.
- tarabukka 14y ago"Sandboxed" apps that can even look at the system drive and inspect its contents? Doesn't sound like much of a sandbox to me.
- adambratt 14y agoHonestly, I find this kind of funny. "iPhone app goes rogue and starts defaming users via twitter" That's not and issue people had to deal with 50 years ago haha.
- mhuffman 14y agoThis is a disgusting abuse of user trust! It makes assumptions about other software and posts insinuations about you on your own twitter account!? I hope they have repercussions enough to make others considering this either think twice or be very upfront about what it intends to do.
- stevewillows 14y agoDoes this count as a violation of one of Asimov's Three Laws?
- leoh 14y agoI wonder how Oxford feels about all this...
- darkstalker 14y agoApps posting tweets without consent of the account owner is a violation of the Twitter rules [1] Get users' permission before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating through your application does not constitute consent to send a message. [1] https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms
- Argorak 14y agoSchemes like this do seem to pop up from time to time. Garrys Mod was the last very well known offender in this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447485 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2447485 (I won't copy over my full complaint, read it there) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payload... (for a very comprehensive list, but without comments about false positives) They are all similar: they are dangerous when gone wrong, damage your brand, expose paying customers as if they were sad idiots and - at worst - ensure that they are ridiculed on support boards even when they have an actual problem. Implementing such a system shows that either the programmer or the project owner in question is a smartass that thinks of himself as more infallible and better than all the others that programmed such systems that subsequently went haywire. Sorry for the harsh words, but after being bitten multiple times by such schemes, I have no nicer ones.
- Groxx 14y agoThis is why I think every API which gives an app access to your data / identity / etc should have a way to fake it, and track whatever it does. Using a different account is sufficient, but what about when things are integrated, like system-wide Twitter or Facebook? Just give us a black-hole option for such things - return no contacts, send no messages, and let us see what it tried to do. You'll have a lot less abuse when it's easy to find.
- Aissen 14y agoNot an iOS user, so I wonder: what would have happened if you didn't have a Twitter account ? Or is it mandatory now ?