Bjork Hopes Pirates Will Crack Her New Music App | Hacker News Reader

Bjork Hopes Pirates Will Crack Her New Music App

drownedinsound.com

28 pointssecretwhistle13 comments

I think I understand her sentiment.

With the adult site I've been working on for a client, we've put things like securing video downloads and preventing password sharing LAST (in fact, we haven't even implemented them yet), in favor of putting all of our energy into making the site and content as excellent as possible.

Our thought is that with the site just starting out, piracy and password sharing probably help a lot more than they hurt right now. We've even posted a good number of the scenes up on private torrent sites that have active discussion forums. Eventually we'll secure the downloads (no DRM, though) and prevent password sharing, but only once we can say that we're by far the best provider of our content.

Not that it will necessarily matter in the end, but for your client's sake I hope the people who are going to care that you are the best provider are the same people who might actually pay for it :P

Your typical porn customer will pay for even crappy porn and a crappy site, but we're trying to get at least some of the people who wouldn't normally pay and let the other companies fight over the people who click random junk traffic links. That's the idea anyway :)

So she's using pirates as an excuse to only release an app for iOS. And with that aim in mind, she had her developers write applications that would "transfer to other systems". That doesn't make sense. At all.

Maybe she honestly did underestimate the effort of porting software -- especially something that someone else has written -- to another platform. Or she just misspoke. It's hard to draw any firm conclusions from the little bit of information contained in that interview. And as usual, the title itself is very assuming.

I'm guessing there's an intent (or at least, desire) to eventually make official ports to Android, etc. That could involve HTML5, shared C libraries, open multimedia formats, etc. I don't think it's related to her comments about pirates.

Bjork is a bit confused. Pirates routinely break the copy protection on iOS apps which means that they will be available to install on other, appropriately prepared systems.

It's currently reasonably infeasible for pirates to reverse engineer the application, to the extent that they can port it to a completely different OS and architecture.

If that's what she wanted accomplished, the least she could do would be to open source the code and assets so that an enterprising Hacker could at least attempt an Android port.

> It's currently reasonably infeasible for pirates to reverse engineer the application, to the extent that they can port it to a completely different OS and architecture.

I mean you no offense, but your statement is factually inaccurate. If a talented and dedicated reverse engineer wanted to put in the effort to create a port from binaries, it is certainly feasible. However, it is reasonably unlikely since it would require a good deal of work.

Cracking the songs out of the bundle and filesharing them isn't out of the question.

Does a "music app" mean that Bjork's album will not integrate with users' iOS iTunes library? No playlists? The article is not very informative.

I prefer hir rhetoric of trust and encouragement, an interpretation remixing "not taking things away" into dispolar non-conflict.

Also, original page title is "Björk trusts pirates will crack Biophilia", wonder why it got changed to Hopes? Just watching your language..

"Also, original page title is "Björk trusts pirates will crack Biophilia", wonder why it got changed to Hopes? Just watching your language.."

It seemed to me that she was hoping that pirates would spread the app to other platforms, rather than just assuming they will.

"She said that she fully expects the new software to become more widely available and end up on less expensive operating systems and devices."

She also apparently has no idea how software works. Pirates are not Magicians, they are Pirates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com