App Auto-Tweets False Piracy Accusations

An anonymous reader writes "Certain iPhone and iPad applications from a Japanese company have broken software piracy detection mechanisms that are sending out tweets on the user's own Twitter account, saying, 'How about we all stop using pirated iOS apps? I promise to stop. I really will. #softwarepirateconfession.' The trouble is, it's sending these out on accounts of users who actually paid up to $50 or more for the software and who are legally using it. The app is asking for access to users' Twitter accounts, but does not give the reason why it is asking, so the author of the article concluded (rightly) that things were being done deliberately. Would you want your legally purchased software to send out messages to all of your contacts on Twitter or on other social networks saying that you were a software pirate? Would you excuse the writers of the software if it was just an error in their piracy detection measures?"

Comments

Re:App permissions

[TheRaven64]

Secondly, when one looks at the amounts of malware available for each platform it does become clear that the 'walled garden' does seem to have an affect on device security.

Until you factor in the fact that iOS uses the MAC framework from FreeBSD to enforce a pretty restrictive access, and has a solid centralised update system, while Android uses a fragile, hacky chroot()-based system and only gets updates for core system libraries on a few devices / carriers. Then it becomes a lot less clear.