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Pirated iOS App Store Site Shuts Down
SternisheFan writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Installous, a major portal for pirated paid apps from Apple's App Store, won't be around anymore. Development team Hackulous today announced the closure of Installous on their official Web site. As of today, the pirated app store no longer works, and only shows these errors: 'Outdated version. Installous will now terminate' or 'API Error. API unavailable.' For many years, Installous offered complete access to thousands of paid iOS apps for free for anyone with a jailbroken iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught."
Stealing $.99 games is clearly a right
Oh wow, the piracy / physical theft analogy. Looks like the first Slashdot troll of the year!
God, root, what is difference ?
I've never understood the desire to pirate apps iOS (or Android/WP) apps. If I'm paying over £500 for the device, then logic dictates that I have enough disposable income to pay the going rate for apps, particularly when most of the popular apps start at the ridiculously low price of 69p. Many of these are published by independent developers or small software firms, where every sale counts.
And seriously, who is so cheap that they would refuse to pay 69p for whatever game is popular at the moment?
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Honestly don't know how they were able to stay up for so long.
Would have been nice to see Apple focusing on shutting down services like these to protect their appstore ecosystem rather than using their patents to go after samsung, etc
yeah.. it's as if someone was running a warez repository with everything on steam with hosted servers and a custom client, far beyond what mere p2p announce sites do. compare it to megaupload for example and it's downright crazy it stayed online and megaupload got shut down.
the closing reasons seem a bit bullshit. it's probably more along the lines that it became too risky and expensive to run(and nobody with right mind would associate with it with their real names anyhow).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As a developer who works on software I'm curious -- why would you not pay for it, but steal it instead? If I've worked long and hard on my application, what exactly gives YOU the right to STEAL MY hard work? I put a lot into the software that I write and if I sell my software (sometimes I just release as open source) than why should you not give me what I ask for it? I'm not even forcing you to use my software.
The solution to your problem is called "going to the store and using your cash to purchase an iTunes gift card". Not having a credit card is no excuse when there's a simple and legal recourse available to you. Stop making excuses.
You're arguing against a much larger problem than merely an issue with iOS or Android. You're arguing against the ability for any company to license its products for sale only in a particular region. That's hardly an issue that's specific to app stores, nor is it an excuse to pirate software.
But if you really want to purchase those apps, it's not hard to do so via "gray" means. Just switch your country within iTunes (from the store's main page, scroll to the bottom and click the circular flag icon for your home country, then choose a different country on the screen that comes up). You'll probably need to grab a gift card from that country for use with purchases made while in that version of the store, but that's not particularly difficult to do.
Also, this whole "not have a credit card" thing is really overblown. It's not hard for a kid to set up a bank account and have a check card connected to it. There's no need to establish a line of credit or be a certain age, since they're only spending money they have at that point. And plenty of online stores, particularly ones that deal in imports, allow for people to send them checks or money orders via snail mail. Sure, it takes a few extra days for everything to get processed, but again, this is not particularly difficult, especially when you're talking about doing something that's of questionable legality to begin with.
we need 3rd party app stores not ones with Pirated apps but ones with say Content that is banded on other app stores, one that offer lower costs to dev's, one that let you have open-source software on them, ones with out API locks.
You can get firefox on Android but not on windows phone or ios.
While not condoning software piracy, I don't think it is wise to repeat the myth that "Pirated software is chock-full of malware".
It is true that some pirated software has malware just as it is true that Windows has malware and some apps from the Apple or Android app stores have malware or may spy on you.
The point is that you need to trust the source and not just download random stuff. I don't know about the quality of the software from this web site (I've never heard of it) but presumably if it had malware, this fact would be outed quickly.
Linux and the other Unixes have a big advantage in that they have "repositories" for their software which are controlled and monitored carefully by the authors and the community and any malware is excluded or outed and fixed rapidly.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I'll amend my statement. "Average, non-technical computer users should assume that pirated software is chock-full of malware".
Apptrackr is. Apptrackr shut down which made Installous pointless since that was the repository that Installous pulled from. As far as I understand they are/were owned by different people, but in either case, it's a case of Apptrackr being gone and the frontend made for it being useless.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
That trick can break the things bought in the first country. It's "better" to get a second account attached to the other region, and use both accounts to get what you want. It's easier to use two accounts on one device than use multiple regions on a single account at the same time.
Learn to love Alaska
"Pirated software is chock-full of malware."
The software on Installous wasn't "pirated". It was copied. There is a real, significant, and LEGAL difference.
Frankly I am getting goddamned tired of seeing people do the RIAA's job for them by labeling copied software as "pirated" when it's not.
If you don't know the difference, LOOK IT UP.
Copying is not theft. Copying is not stealing. It is NOT the same thing.
Back in 1985 a man named Dowling was prosecuted for the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property for selling infringing copies of Elvis records. U.S. Supreme Court in DOWLING v. UNITED STATES, 473 U.S. 207 (1985) http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&court=US&case=/us/473/207.html struck this down because copyright infringement is not theft. You have to deprive your victim of the item in order to steal it from them. Making copies doesn't deprive anyone of what is being copied, therefore its not theft.
It is, however, just as illegal.
Yes, okay, sure. The strict definition of copying and theft aren't isomorphic. That's fine.
But the reason why there's even anything called 'Copyright Infringement' is because there's a general notion that one can make a creative work that's value is in the concept rather than the physical embodiment.
Elvis music had value beyond the disc it was printed on. (If that weren't true, people wouldn't have wanted so badly to listen to it.)
Physicality is not the be-all and end-all of this discussion. If you go and get a haircut, you still have to pay, even though by walking out of the salon you haven't taken anything PHYSICAL. There was work invested in that haircut. It's a service. Services aren't necessarily tangible (psychotherapy, for instance) but there's still value in them.
I don't know why slashdotters have persisted for well over ten years now to insist only physical things can have value when most of us make our livings by providing services and selling the decidedly intangible work.
If someone is charging for an application, you have two—and ONLY two options—take it or leave it. If the work has value greater than or equal to the cost that they ask, you pay. If the work isn't worth what they're charging, you go looking for something else or write your own. Those are seriously your only two MORAL choices. Everything else is equivocation about how cheap a bastard you are.
You can follow that notion if you like. The notion I tend to follow isn't the promulgated one of compensation for conceptual thoughts. The original notion of copyright is buried in the history of the Vatican during the protestant reformation for control of the printing press and rapid dissemination of the Bible. Pesky protestants of the day were reading and putting their own spin on the Bible, this angered a corrupted Rome. To combat this loss of power, the corrupted officials (the Pope, et. al) introduced legislation to prohibit copying things (the Bible). The cried out how the poor scribes would loose their jobs, when the reality was that these corrupted officials would loose their jobs as the hoi polloi of the day might just be able to understand that the Bible wasn't all truth, but, in fact it was a poorly verified historical document.
Say what you will about it being theft, but, the true reason for copyright isn't to compensate the "owners" of Elvis' recordings. The true reason for the continuance of copyright is to ensure that certain corruptible officials maintain their lifestyle at the expense of the "hoi polloi".
Maybe thats because the copyright system is both morally and intellectually corrupt, from it's birth to it's modern day construct. Slashdot is (or once was) an intellectual site, people with intelligence can see just how wrong the system is because, unlike the sheep, we can see just how wrong copyright is. The foundations of this well justified persistence most likely originate from these original slash-dotters.
Does it go on forever?
Based on the punishments being handed out for copying vs theft I'd have to say that copying is more illegal.