piracy

Dare to compare. Click to enlarge.

Just today, Plurkblog has released a post showing that MSN China's MClub is a ripoff of their own microblogging service. The post provides a comparison of the current plurk pages and of the mclub's pages, which further solidifies Plurk's claim of code theft and copy. Although imitation is a for of flattery, this kind of imitation is outright blatant and a punch-in-the-face.

This is a huge setback for Microsoft who is a staunch defender of intellectual rights. They showed this by starting a witchunt on pirated or hacked copies of XBox from their Live system.

One would think, however, that MS China may have been controlled by someone from the government, given that in China the government controls most of the economical decisions. Given China's penchant for ignoring intellectual property rights of major brands in the country (a few examples here, here, here, here, and here) one may infer here that China may have asked Microsoft to create a Chinese version of Plurk, and place it in their MSN China network.

Bloggers and developers out there: You may never know when your source code may have been hijacked.

Via Plurk Blog.

How many times people watched illegally shared anime lately?...Easy answer...Millions....69 millions times actually!

According to NHK news, the Association of Japanese Animation (AJA) surveyed the present situation of the illegally shared anime. From February to March 2009, 38 thousand illegal files were uploaded to Japanese and non-Japanese websites and they were watched 69 million times during the period. AJA staff said they will keep on making efforts to spread high-quality pay streaming services in opposition to the prevailed illegal websites.

Source: NHK via MAL

Well, not everything is bad, at least for some at the other side of the Pacific...

Crunchyroll's pay streaming service ($7 per month) has 4.5 million members and they provide 200 titles, 5,000 episodes. The president of Crunchyroll Japan Branch Vincent Shortino said the number of illegal downloads of NARUTO episodes decreased by 74% after their official streaming started.

Source: Ascii via MAL

My only concern about all of this is the fact that not many can watch legal streaming services due to region locks....and for a rhyme, it sucks! Lets hope They do something about that.

Rapidshare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. Rapidshare is a one click hosting provides paid and free services, owned by German and running from Switzerland. The Regional Court of Hamburg has ruled in favor of German collecting society GEMA, which had requested that the court issue an order prohibiting file-hosting service rapidshare.com from making around 5,000 music tracks available on the Internet. [ Read more ]

The Regional court orders Rapidshare to pay a 34 million dollar fine to GEMA, and to start actively filtering and removing the files it hosts for copyrighted content. Initally the case was brought on by copyright protection association GEMA. The court also mentions the precautions allegedly taken by rapidshare and other file hosting website is not sufficient to prevent copyright issues.

"The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks," mentioned in GEMA declaration.

Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare AG in Cham (Switzerland)

Now that you know how iPhone piracy works, (if not, click here to read previous article), you probably want to know how you can prevent it. This article will tell you that, but please note this. This is getting published for all to see, including the people that want to crack your application. If I provide you with code or a method to do a certain check in here, do not just copy it verbatim, tweak it a little so that the crackers don’t know exactly what to look for.

Since we know that crackers are going to crack your app anyway, we do not want to look at this in a “we need to stop them” way. You must know that it will happen. We need to think of this in a “hold them off as long as possible” way. The first step would be obfuscation, to confuse them. Save the code attached to the end of this post and save it In a file called “iPhoneOS_swi.S”. Include it in one of your projects and, for example, you want a discrete exit(), simply call swi_exit(); from your code. Crackers will soon catch on to this, but it is at least better then flat out and obviously calling exit(). This will at least cause some confusion. If you want to try further obfuscation, use swi_exit_obfuscated()

**This is a guest article by Will Strafach. Unlike you, this person got off his ass and earned some $$ writing about what he loves. He has accomplished something with his life, he has written for MrCracker.com . What have you done? Click Here to start.**

Developing iPhone applications is all the rage now. From the mutli-million dollar software company, to the teenager in his bedroom, it has become a new phenomenon. There are now over one billion application downloads from the Apple App Store, and even more in the unofficial homebrew Cydia Store, which is an application that allows developers to make available, for free or for pay, applications that utilize private calls and libraries. For both though, there is a rising problem for developers. This problem is piracy of their applications, which means people buy the application and patch it to work on the device’s of other people for free. In this article, I will tell you how exactly people pirate the applications, and how you can fight back. Keep in mind that eventually, one way or another, the application will get cracked. Instead of thinking with the mindset, “How can I not let this get cracked?”, it is easier to think like, “How can I prevent this from getting cracked as long as possible?”.