Developer frustrated that Apple grants Game Center support to pirated iOS apps - Page 3

Yea, well, that's like, your opinion man...





In all seriousness though there are many a reason to jailbreak.

Including but not limited to:

Expanded status bar icons (lockinfo)
Useful lock screen (lockinfo)
SMS quick reply (BiteSMS, QuickReply, etc.)
LED flash(light) activation from lock screen
Quick settings (SBSettings)
iTunes Sync over WiFi
Unrestricted downloads over 3G (My3G)
Custom tones for SMS, email, etc. (WinterBoard)

I know that apple is finally bringing many of these features to iOS 5, for that reason I dubbed iOS 5 early on their "jailbreak edition".

You may be content with a device with factory functionality but don't assume that everyone else thinks the way or has the same low standards that you do, it's naive and arrogant.

The only thing here that has no good, legitimate basis is your stinking sespool of a comment.

Lastly, I've been jailbreaking my iOS devices for the past 3.5 years and in that time have never pirated an app.

And people like you are in the minority here.

Uh, it's Apples money being stolen, as well as developers.

Reality check, it ain't, end of story.

That's the same like saying just because some guys downloaded few movies from torrent sites movie companies lost money. They showed by downloading that they are not willing to pay. Same here.

I find it funny that you are so opposed to stealing software, but seem to be ok with breaking your terms of agreement for your wireless carrier via jail breaking for MyWi.. I understand your argument that it wasn't available as an option, however this still doesn't make it less of you breaching your terms of service. If I operated a network and didn't think it could handle 2 million people tethering multiple devices over it, and I chose to not offer it to preserve the network that doesn't give you license to circumvent it.

I'm not trying to flame you, and I applaud your honesty in software. Just pointing out that you may be overlooking this conviction in other areas.

Now about this whole thing with the piracy, I completely agree that Apple should (and likely is) take action not only against those that provide means to accomplish the piracy, but ALSO the INDIVIDUALS who are pirating. As others have pointed out there are definitely ways to monitor and flag pirated copies of games. 1st is that the iOS model has DRM built in when the game is submitted via iTunes connect. So a pirated copy of an app will have this stripped (which only will work on a jail-broken device) or people are hacking it and resigning the app (which could work on non-jailbroken devices) either way the checksum will not match what is on the iTunes servers, and likely the file size will be off slightly. These are 2 quick ways to immediately tell that an app is pirated. Apple should be using the fact that many people with jailbroken devices do pirate app's, however they also are connected to an AppleID somehow, either via some legitimate app purchases, or just being signed in to an Apple ID. Apple should (and may be) logging Apple ID's that are using pirated app's. Apple surely can see this and likely already log's this, as they originally used this argument when trying to fight the legality of jail breaking. They should on the other hand hold INDIVIDUALS responsible for their actions and at a minimum provide support to developers with any information such as AppleID's that have used altered copies of a developers app so they may subpoena and press charges against individuals who have pirated their software. Or seek to collect the cost of said app plus court costs. It wouldn't take very long to drastically slow down piracy when these "casual pirates" realize they stole $.99 and now have to pay $.99 plus $1000 in legal costs.

I think this guy asking for pirates to lose functionality of GameCenter is laughable, He should be asking for apple to use the connection of GameCenter to compare checksums to log GameCenter ID's as well as AppleID's that are associated with it if they are using a modified copy of the game. The vast majority of people who pirate any type of digital media (software, music, movies, etc) are not intelligent enough to do so alone. This is why large entities choose to focus on the "enablers" rather than the individuals. Without hackers making tools to break DVD encryption and rip a DVD, 99% of DVD rip's wouldn't be happening. This approach however has had limited success in stopping digital media pirating. Look at the Music industry, the RIAA fought, and sued, and attacked the file sharing networks... They won, and some of those systems looked to change into a legitimate business model, like Napster, etc.. however there is still rampant theft of digital music. This is because some other group will use what was already done to continue pirating even though the system you sued and won against ceases to exist. That approach also doesn't address these "enablers" to move their system to another country that doesn't have the same laws. If you start holding accountable the INDIVIDUALS who are ultimately responsible for choosing to steal fewer people would continue to engage in this behavior. This would be like busting a drug deal, the dealer who has lots of drugs, is making drugs, etc getting arrested, but the individuals who are using the drugs don't get charged with possession.

Again Lamewing, didn't mean to flame you. It just struck me as amusing that you mentioned all very legitimate reasons for jail breaking, and then put that in (). This suggests to me that now that it's an option you are paying for it and using it. It's interesting to see where the lines get drawn in peoples minds.

What kind of low-life scum would pirate a 99c app? And what kind of penny-pinching freak would download a pirated 99c app?

Possibly, I can say this: among the people I know personally who jailbreak (5) not a single one of them did so to pirate apps, maybe it's an age thing, my group is late 20s and early 30s.

To be honest if I were in my late teens or early 20s I'd probably be pirating apps like crazy... (broke college student)

I suppose growing up and having a good paying job changes your perspective on things

I don't think you understand how a checksum works. it's not preventing it from being cracked. Any change in the file, i.e. to crack it by changing those lines of code, will alter the hash. Thus allowing you to know it is an altered copy. Yes they will still be able to crack the app's DRM but this will end up with a different hash and could be used to log AppleID's using altered apps. This is also likely how developers are seeing piracy, but without apple's support to tie AppleID customer info to the offending pirate they really don't have much control over how it is addressed.

But once you're jailbroken there is nothing to stop you modifying the OS to no longer report the true checksum & filesize, but instead report a spoofed checksum & filesize.
OS level DRM only works when the OS can't be hacked itself.


Why would apple want to annoy tens of thousands of consumers who bought their products, and accrue hugely bad PR when the benefits are primarily to app developers who face a substantially worse situation on the competing platform? Apple has seen how well this sort of thing played for the record industry and movie industry, they want no part in suing their customers.

This is the most ignorant argument I've ever seen. Yes that is the same. Yes that is also stealing and taking money away from the studio's, producers, actors, writers, etc. (everyone involved in creating said movies). Just because they are not willing to pay doesn't give them license to not pay. They do have a choice, not pay -> don't watch & enjoy movie, pay -> watch and enjoy movie. Just because you are not willing to pay for something does not give you the right to use it without paying for it.

'That's the same like saying just because I come shoot you with my gun your parents lost their life. I showed by shooting you that I am not willing to have you on this earth. Same here.'

What a truly stupid argument.

You are confusing inventing a new DRM system with avoiding cracked apps making their way into gamecenter, which this article is about.

Kinda true, but again, I think the concept might be misunderstood here.

"An illustration of the potential use of a cryptographic hash is as follows: Alice poses a tough math problem to Bob, and claims she has solved it. Bob would like to try it himself, but would yet like to be sure that Alice is not bluffing. Therefore, Alice writes down her solution, appends a random nonce, computes its hash and tells Bob the hash value (whilst keeping the solution and nonce secret). This way, when Bob comes up with the solution himself a few days later, Alice can prove that she had the solution earlier by revealing the nonce to Bob. (This is an example of a simple commitment scheme; in actual practice, Alice and Bob will often be computer programs, and the secret would be something less easily spoofed than a claimed puzzle solution)."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptog..._hash_function

This also introduces another concept that is often used which is the idea of a public & private key pair. The public key being the solution to the problem, and the private key being the nonce Alice added. It would be rather hard to "spoof" a hash that would match the hash on the iTunes server without having the developers unique private key certificate.

You don't have to decompile squat. The value that is compared to is stored in the binary itself. Find it and update it to match the cracked version.

Or, update the binary to jump past the check.
Or, update the binary to do the check, but not jump when a error is detected.

These are all gross simplifications, but not by much. They represent some of the options that a cracker has when dealing with a "3 lines of code value check".

I don't think you understand what was originally posted.

The "simple 3 lines of code" check that was suggested is something along the lines of:

if (x != y) {
piratedCopy();
}

I'm saying that it is a trivial process to update the binary itself so that "y" is whatever you need it to be.

Does that mean that there are not other options? Absolutely not. I'm saying that it ultimately is not as simple as doing a basic comparison to take action against pirated apps.

But that is more restrictive than Apple's Terms of Service. Apple allows person 1 to buy an app and put it on all the iDevices in the family (up to 10). However, each of those folks can have their own Game Center account.

Thus, the number of folks registering for Game Center for a given app can be up to 10x higher than the number of paid copies with 0% piracy.

Nothing stupid about it. There are people that will never buy a movie or an app and saying that studios or devs lost money doesn't change much.

I have 4 devices in my household all sharing a single Apple ID as far as purchasing and using apps. not sure if setup a different GameCenter ID for the kid or not - may have to look at that.

Deleted.

It's obvious you can't use the GCID to identify pirate copies. But what about this hypothetical scenario...

Account PurchaseAccount used to buy the game.
Accounts PlayAccount1 through 5 used in Gamecenter.

What if the app stored the account used to purchase on any devices it's loaded onto?

Game runs and connects to GC with PlayAccount1. But at the same time it also checks to make sure PurchaseAccount actually bought the game. If it doesn't check out, it blocks GC.

It seems like this sort of thing could work with any app that needs to connect to a server on the developer side - if the server refuses to connect and provide data necessary to run the app, how would that be hacked around? Again, this obviously wouldn't work for apps that don't require a network connection or connect with sites not affiliated with the developer of the app.

Would something like that work or am I missing something?

What really blows my mind is the sheer number of pirated apps on mobile phones. You see, something like Photoshop I can understand. It's expensive. Most people pirating it would never have been able to justify the purchase as they only want to play around. Adobe probably isn't losing much.

But mobile apps? This many people pirate something that costs $.99? How the hell can they justify that? It's cheap. Really cheap. Buy it or do without, or deal with ads. Criminy.

Are you really so much of a cheapskate that you wouldn't spend a buck on some mobile entertainment? Here's a crazy idea: If you will never buy it, then do without. Amazing, isn't it? "I wouldn't buy it anyway" is often a BS justification by selfish asshats when they pirate, and how many actually buy a legit copy if they like it? Very few. We're not talking about a $1,000 software package here. We're talking about something that costs less than the amount most people have in their chump change pocket.

more companies should have tiered pricing - realsoftware for example - one price for download only including license - additional fee if you want media - additional fee if you want printed manual - additional fee if you want support. - of course in the case of Adobe that could get excessively complicated - though I do wonder if they would have twice as many folks paying full price if full price was only half as much as it is now.

Don't forget though - that in cases such as Adobe Creative Suite - they do not expect individual home users to spend $2000+ - that is for businesses who have no choice if they want to run their business and who have deeper pockets and can us it as a tax deduction.

$2600 for FUll CS5.5 makes no sense for me - but $100 or maybe even $200 to get fully licensed but without any paper manuals or support would work for me.

I'm not saying that simply saying "hey some dev lost money because someone stole their app" is going to change anything. In fact I'm advocating the opposite, which is to actually hold those individuals accountable. What you originally said was:


So "just because some guys downloaded few movies from torrent sites movie companies lost money." which you then state that because they downloaded it they are unwilling to pay for it. So that means movie studios didn't lose out on a sale? That is what you implied and that is the most common illogic when it comes to people thinking about intangible products. As I said before, they absolutely have the right to be unwilling to pay $.99 for an app. However when they use that app, without paying for it, the developer absolutely lost out on that $.99 regardless of that persons willingness to pay. I'm unwilling to pay half a million dollar for a car (mostly because I'm also unable to pay that), that doesn't mean if I go steal a SLR McLaren that they didn't lose money because I wasn't willing to pay for it anyway.

The point is that most intellectual property theft is committed by people who wouldn't normally have the means to perpetrate the crime. The "willingness to pay" is not an on or off mechanism and it is also not the same between individuals. This is why there is a market, as well as why a dutch auction works. The problem is more an ease of theft vs consequence than it is a willingness to pay issue.

That's why we have Photoshop Elements and the like. It's certainly a good idea for devs to try and mitigate that sort of thing with a tiered model. Maybe not something just like this, but something in that vein. Then again, I think Adobe knows that there are enough shops/pros/etc out there who will buy their software at that price (bad idea to run a business off of pirated software...) that they don't really need to adopt that kind of model.

Similarly, devs for mobile apps should certainly offer some sort of demo/lite version/ad-supported version/etc to let people try it out, but that's only going to do so much.

While its tempting to a frustrated developer to suggest Apple such an idea, Apple is wise NOT to use Game Center for anything else outside its core functionality. Reasons:

1. Game Center is an optional component and must remain optional. No one is forced to sign in, and this cant be avoided because otherwise games wont have offline mode. Yes, you can limit multiplayer part of your game to operate under Game Center, but putting dependency on app store connection will add time overhead to start playing. In other words: logging into GC is fast, but establishing connection to the app store to check transaction history - action that might require entering user account password again - is way too much for an average mobile gamer to swallow.

2. Theres already more robust anti-piracy check through in-app purchase mechanism : deploy your game as a free version in unlock full potential via in-app purchase. In order to restore full game on other device the user will have to allow the app to check if its been purchased.

I believe Apple is fighting piracy by making jailbreaking less and less appealing. Many casual pirates who pirated just because it was convenient enough wont do it again if piracy wasnt the main purpose of jailbreaking for them in the first place I believe this was the most successful anti-piracy strategy to date.

Not really, I think he had it closer to what I intended than yourself. I was thinking more along the lines of:

Checksum the binary
Phone home with the checksum
Allow the remote server to sent a result back to say if it's valid or not
continue appropriately

So it's not so simple as trivial as you say, because neither the value of the checksum, or it's validity is held within the binary. Trying to bypass the code that is executed based on the result cannot be done without changing the code, it's not a simple hex edit to alter a value

The game center could have access to your purchase list. If you try to connect with a game that is not in your purchase list, then you would be denied access. This is not in place at the moment, but it is the realms of something that could be developed. Other solutions including a watermark in the binary that includes you customer ID and a corresponding unique signature that the server could then check.

They do, it's called Adobe Elements. The photoshop elements & Premier Elements package is $119. The fact that you seem to think that "paper manuals or support" is why Adobe charges $2600 for their Creative Suite Master Collection shows to me that you are really out of touch with reality. I also find it funny that you think CS is "for businesses who have no choice if they want to run their business and who have deeper pockets and can us it as a tax deduction.". I know many professional individuals that use Photoshop CS5. But you are right on one thing, Adobe does not expect an individual home user to spend $2600 for CSMC, They also don't expect you to use it. Thats why they are referred to a "Professional" products. They are intended to be used in a profession that is able to use a $2600 tool to make money. Should Ford sell you an F350 for $12,000 because you are an individual home user? No, but they do have a Ranger that is closer to that price range if you want a "home user" grade truck.

Wow. If these numbers are true, jailbreaking is way more popular than I thought it was.

I'd rather have Apple focused on preventing piracy in general, versus wasting too much time on Game Center. Someone wouldn't pay $0.99 for your app, but they would pay $0.99 if they were forced to in order to use your game with the Game Center leaderboards. Seriously?! I really doubt Game Center is that important to most people.

Here's an idea for GAMEized: try making a game worth buying, not some Paper Toss clone with different graphics. Your business plan appears to involve copying popular games to create generic game "engines" that can be customized to your clients' preferences. But in the end, most people aren't going to pay $0.99 just to flick a soccer ball instead of flicking a paper wad for free.

After years of cat and mouse DRM games, the most effective anti-piracy measure seems to be producing a product people want at a price they're willing to pay.

I dunno, but this is a perfectly reasonable assertion to me:

Why would you assume this? There is no requirement that the Apple ID used to purchase an app an the Game Center ID be the same - plenty of legitimate reasons for this have been cited in the thread already.

Er, let's cut down on the hyperbole a little OK?

Apple can't pursue legal action against those who make jailbreaks available, but they can certainly stop it. All they have to do is tighten up their code (i.e. the iOS 4.3.4 update that is pending).

For some extra expense, Apple could certainly make jailbreaking impractical. Not impossible, but they could certainly raise the bar to something that only a few with specialized tools could do. If enough crap like rampant piracy continues, it could motivate Apple to take those steps. Our costs would go up, flexibility in the devices would be removed - all because a few assholes with no morals and infinite ability to rationalize bad behavior act poorly.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Not hard, just not worth the effort - so far. There are multiple techniques that Apple could use, but they drive up manufacturing and engineering costs. They can never 100% protect something that someone has physical access to - but they can make it impractical for all but the most skilled/determined. It just depends on where the tipping point it. So far it's still in the "Apathy" zone from Apple's perspective, but if people are people and the number of asshole pirates keeps increasing, I wouldn't be surprised if at sometime Apple really raises the bar.

What serial number?

If your not willing to pay, you have no right to the app and you are stealing.

Same as with movies.

Whether or not people are "willing" is immaterial. If you don't like that something costs money, your only recourse is to not use and and do something else. Not blatantly thieve and then rationalize the blatant theft away.

Sheesh... and people wonder why our economy is tanking?

Fine - but if Apple were to deploy a 100% foolproof block for jailbreaking tomorrow - oh well! It's their right.

Personally I don't care one way or the other. I was going to jailbreak for wifi sync and a few other goodies, but iOS 5 will finally address those. So now I don't have to worry about it - and the biggest reason I love my iPhone and iPad will be preserved: the appliance-like experience. I have no problem tweaking the hell out of my Windows and Mac machines, but I like that the integrated environment for iOS devices yields the most stable and problem free devices I have owned for what are basically pocket computers.

I also have no problem with jailbreakers - for now. But if the jailbreak community starts doing stuff that dissuades developers, then I will be all for Apple slamming the door shut. If you don't agree, then have fun with Android, Palm or one of the $99 linux devices... that's what great about choice!

Whether or not they would have or have not lost money ITS STILL THEFT

You can rationalize it all you want but it's still theft, just like the sky is blue and gravity is preventing you from being flung into space.

People are assholes and their ability to rationalize is incredible.

Just look at Povilas above me