Apple Bans Another Developer, 1000+ Apps Pulled | Hacker News Reader

Apple Bans Another Developer, 1000+ Apps Pulled

mobilecrunch.com

21 pointsvrobancho18 comments

Apple should just monitor high volume developers. I'm not saying all developers with 100+ apps are evil, some are ebooks or whatever, but they should definitely keep an eye on them. Many developers with that many apps are doing something weird like splitting an app into 50 overly specific apps or sometimes very shady techniques like in this article.

Neat. All I need is 40 accounts to eliminate my competition.

No Kidding! This sets a dangerous precedent.

That is, if you don't end up just eliminating yourself.

We could also interpret your comment as meaning: "I've already hacked into my competitor's machines, so Apple can trace the IP addresses back to them."

Yes, you could interpret it that way... Do you really think apple examined the ownership of each IP? Oh, comcast ip XXX happens to be the mom of the lead sales guy of this app! ban the app!

Seems unlikely to me, but I'm not privy to apple's internal investigation system. I'd wager you aren't either ;)

It wasn't a commentary on Apple's investigations. It was a commentary on the lack of foresight in your scheme.

I see your point though. Tracing IP addresses through an ISP's DHCP is probably way too complicated and expensive for a little fly-by-night operation like Apple. They wouldn't have any pull with Comcast.

(Hmmm, your "clever" rejoinder has a few problems of its own. Left as an exercise. Take some advice: Keep your day job. Planning heists doesn't seem to be your strong point.)

When trying to look at a product you're thinking of buying, ignore the 5 star reviews. Those are always a mix of fanboys (whose posts amount to "<insert product here> is awes0me!!1!1"), people paid to rate it high and other people who like the product but don't tend to have much useful to say (you tend to already know all of the advantages of the product from the marketing department). Looking at the 1 and 2 star reviews is always better as you tend to get an idea of what the problems with the product are and why you might not like it. A balanced approach will always give you the most information.

It seems like cliques like this should be pretty easy to statistically discover.

Does anyone have a dataset I could try this on?

There's been some academic work on identifying these attacks recently. Most of the work I've seen crawls social networks directly. You could try contacting the authors to see if they will share their data sets.

Representative example: SybilLimit: A Near-Optimal Social Network Defense against Sybil Attacks Haifeng Yu, Phillip B. Gibbons, Michael Kaminsky,Feng Xiao http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~yuhf/yuh-sybillimit.pdf

A more recent paper looks at a data set from Digg to discover vote manipulation; the authors are interested in further applications and would probably appreciate your contact.

Sybil Resilient Content Rating D.M. Tran, B. Min, J. Li, L. Subramanian http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~lakshmi/nsdi09.pdf

Apple should automatically flag accounts who release over a dozen, fifty, or so many apps and review each account. This would cut down on abusers and let them focus their efforts more productively.

I doubt it. If there is significant money in this then the "scammer" will just open up new bank accounts under different names and submit 49 apps a piece. It won't be as easy but it will still be profitable.

This should clean up the App store a hair.

What happens to purchases already made? Would your iphone still have the app or will it disappear?

They stay on your iPhone/iPod. But of course you no longer can get updates.

I have the Delicious Library app that the developer pulled due to it violating Amazon's API ToS (as revised after the app was released). It still works, and has even made a device transition (iPod -> iPhone).

Isn't this kind of vote fraud commonplace?

Probably but if they're mixed in with a fair amount of legitimate reviews it's really hard to detect. It sounds like 90% of their reviews were coming from the same users who exclusively review this companies applications.

Hey, gota admit that its good that apple keeps tabs on such things. If only Ebay did these sort of things.

According to the story, Apple wasn't keeping tabs on it. They only took action when an independent third party pointed out the problem to them.

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