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Reverse bitorrent technology, the future of piracy?
Hackulous, an online community against everything DRM and legal have been at the app cracking game for some time now. They’ve been making paid apps found on the iTunes App Store available for free on Installous, the “App Store” for jailbroken iPhones for the past two years and now they’ve announced the next step in app piracy. Because not every app has been cracked yet, Hackulous have devised a method to scour the world for more apps to fill the store. Mobile Hunt, nicknamed “Reverse BitTorrent”, is what they are calling it. How does it work? Users that manage to crack an app that isn’t available on Apptrackr (a database that lists all the cracked apps available for download from Installous) will receive a message telling them that they have an app that Apptrackr doesn’t. If users choose to do so, they can share the cracked app online by uploading it in the background. Users won’t have to spend all their bandwidth uploading the whole app as they’ll only upload bits and pieces of it (in the event that it’s a large file) – users all over the world with the same cracked app will be doing the same thing as well, just like in BitTorrent. So instead of having a torrent file to locate all the pieces of a file (like regular BT), Mobile Hunt will collect all the parts and pieces of a software from users all over the world, and then make the app available as a regular download on Installous. Sounds like a pretty nifty idea. We wonder what steps Apple will take to fight against this piracy. How many of you are advocates of pirated software on your iPhone?
The title says it all, and that was pretty quick. It was only yesterday when the iOS 5 was announced and the beta was made available to developers but yet wasting little to no time, hackers MuscleNerd and Co have managed to jailbreak iOS 5 on the iPod touch fourth generation. The exploit they used was the limera1n jailbreak which means that iOS 5 presented the hackers with little surprises when it came to closing the loop holes that would make the limera1n exploit work.
Naturally the iOS 5 is currently in beta which means there are probably still plenty of holes to be exploited and we can only assume that in the final release iOS 5 would-be hackers will have a harder time trying to jailbreak it. However this is good news for those on jailbroken devices who were worried that they might be in for a rather long wait when it comes to getting the jailbroken version if iOS 5 on their devices.
Anyone who has owned an iOS device knows that upon out of the box, the first thing they see is their device asking them to tether it to their computer in order to set up synch with iTunes. Not necessarily a bad thing but what if the person’s computer was not well equipped enough to run iTunes properly or what if they didn’t know what all these synching meant?
Tabbed browsing isn’t new. In fact there are browser apps already available for iOS that features tabbed browsing, but either way we are happy that Apple has decided to sit up and take notice of what users want in their browsers and finally implemented tabbed browsing in their native iOS browser app, Safari.